by Val McDermid
‘Where’s Laidlaw?’ Karen asked.
‘We got a list of Dandy Muir’s friends from her phone, cross-checked it with her husband. Jacqui’s out trawling, seeing whether Dandy said anything to anybody about you giving her the gypsy warning.’
‘Hearsay,’ she said gloomily.
‘Aye, but hearsay from a dead victim sometimes gets heard,’ Jimmy pointed out. ‘But I’m not holding my breath for Jacqui catching anything. Dandy said nothing to her husband and he reckons if she didn’t tell him, she didn’t tell anybody.’
Karen snorted. ‘I’ll never get used to the way men think they know their wives. Something like this, the husband’s the last one she’d tell. Especially since the four of them moved in the same dinner party circles.’
‘I hope you’re right. We desperately need something more. Dr Shah’s report is good stuff but, like River says, it’s a new area of expertise. The court’s always wary of accepting science that isn’t tried and tested, then tested again.’
‘It’s convincing, though.’
He looked sceptical. ‘Do you remember the first time the Crown presented vein pattern analysis to identify a paedophile from a photograph of his forearm? Hours of legal argument. And in spite of the sheriff finally agreeing, the jury still made their decision on witness testimony rather than the science.’
Karen nodded wearily. ‘They struggled with it. Because they’d never seen vein pattern analysis on CSI or read about it online or in the papers. But now, the novelty’s worn off and it’s accepted by judges and juries. I think people are maybe a bit more open to scientific evidence these days, especially since the expert witnesses have got better at presenting the science in ways that ordinary punters can understand.’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘It’s as much of a struggle to get lawyers and judges to understand. This theory of Dr Shah’s sounds good on paper. Looks good too. But because it’s untested, the defence will do their best to demolish it. And you’ve got to admit, it all sounds a bit creepy. Like the return of the resurrection men. Messing about with corpses in the supposed interest of furthering our understanding.’
Karen was disappointed with Jimmy’s lack of enthusiasm for the wound analysis. She’d genuinely thought he’d see it as a breakthrough, as she had. ‘At least it’s something to push Willow Henderson with.’
He conceded that with a dip of his head and a tip of his glass. ‘I need more, though. I need another piece of evidence before I can put her under real pressure, never mind get enough to arrest her. It’s frustrating, Karen. I’m pretty sure you’re right about what really went down in that kitchen, but for now we’re stuck.’
They sat in silence, sipping their drinks, staring glumly at the table. Karen had hoped the new evidence would move things forward. Ann Markie was coming at her from all directions and the woman wasn’t going to leave her alone until Karen could protect herself with success. ‘Let me know if there’s anything more I can do,’ she said. ‘Everything I touch at the moment seems to be going nowhere. And the Dog Biscuit is snapping at my heels everywhere I turn.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know why she’s got it in for me. River reckons she’s a control freak. Trying to get me out of the HCU so she can put in one of her placemen and take all the credit for the cases the unit clears.’ She fiddled with her glass. ‘Maybe she’s right. But it feels more personal than that.’
Jimmy fidgeted. ‘Don’t let her get to you. You’re better than that.’
‘Easy for you to say. She’s not breathing down your neck, telling you your coat’s on a shoogly peg.’ Karen fixed him with her eyes. ‘I love my job, Jimmy. I know there’s not much to HCU, but I’ve built what there is. And me and the Mint, we do good work. I don’t understand why even a control freak would want to put a spoke in my wheel. She already claims the kudos for what we do, we come under her remit. It’s hard not to feel it’s personal.’
Jimmy’s mouth twitched expressively, as if he was holding something back that he wasn’t comfortable with. Karen saw his unease. ‘What is it, Jimmy? What are you not telling me? I thought we didn’t keep stuff back from each other?’
He screwed his face up in an awkward grimace. ‘It feels personal because it is personal.’ He stood up abruptly. ‘I need a proper drink. You want one?’
She nodded. What was so difficult that Jimmy needed a bracer before he could tell her? She watched him push through to the bar and catch the bartender’s attention. His shoulders were tense, higher than usual.
Before long, he was back with a pair of gin and tonics. ‘Millers,’ he said tersely, pointing at the slice of cucumber floating in the drink.
‘Never mind that. What do you know about Markie?’
‘I never wanted to tell you this. Hell, Phil never wanted you to know about this.’
A cold hand of apprehension gripped Karen’s heart. Phil? What had Ann Markie to do with Phil? The idea of them together filled her with dread and nausea in equal measure. ‘Know about what?’ she growled.
Jimmy’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘Nothing happened, Karen. For God’s sake, you can’t imagine Phil would be interested in an ice queen like Markie?’
Karen took a mouthful of her drink. It tasted like acid on her tongue. ‘Get to the point, Jimmy.’
‘It was right before you and Phil got together. You remember he went on an interview techniques course at Tulliallan?’ The police staff college ran regular courses on a variety of subjects, Karen had endured a few herself. They were always a mixture of genuinely useful information and annoying human interactions.
‘I remember. I thought we needed to get better at accessing people’s distant memories.’
‘Right. Well, Markie was on the same course. She was only a DCI then. I reckon she was more interested in honing her media interview skills than in getting better at screwing information out of villains. Anyway, she took a fancy to Phil. Which was awkward for him, because she outranked him.’
‘I outranked him,’ Karen pointed out.
‘That was different. He’d known you for years, and you never act the high heid yin the way she does. Once he realised, Phil did his best to avoid her but she did make a pass at him late one night after they’d all been in the bar. And he knocked her back in spite of her trying to pull rank on him. He said she was really pissed off with him.’
‘She must have felt humiliated.’ Karen couldn’t help thinking herself into Ann Markie’s shoes. She knew all about the pain of knock-backs, even though she’d barely ever made any kind of move on somebody she fancied. And Markie was an attractive woman. Karen guessed she wasn’t accustomed to being turned down, especially in the ‘what happens in Vegas’ atmosphere of Tulliallan courses.
‘I suppose so. Anyway, he made it clear he wasn’t interested. But less than two months later, you moved in with Phil.’
Karen sipped her drink, considering. ‘She’d have been livid when she found out. He turned down the beautiful high-flying Ann Markie for a dumpy wee woman with bad hair and terrible dress sense. And zero ambition.’ Karen gave a rueful laugh. ‘How dare he? How would she not take that personally? That is definitely the kind of grievance that rankles. No wonder she wants to see me crawling over broken glass.’
‘You’re taking it very well,’ Jimmy observed.
Karen shrugged. ‘It’s a pain in the arse to deal with. No getting away from that. But here’s the thing, Jimmy. Every time she has a go at me, all I have to do is remind myself that she might have wanted Phil, but I was the one he chose. I was the one he loved. I might not have had him for as long as I wanted, but we had something she’ll never have.’
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Jimmy said. She could see the relief in his face, in his posture. He’d been afraid she’d go off on one when he revealed the reason for the Dog Biscuit’s constant hectoring, and like most men, he’d been apprehensive at the prospect of an irate and emotional woman. But she hadn’t been angry. She was actually relieved to know what lay behind her boss’s hostility. In truth, Karen
felt a degree of sympathy for Markie.
Not enough sympathy to cut her some slack, however.
But one thing was clear. Now the final piece of the puzzle was in place, Karen understood what was really going on. That made her even more determined to get all three cases moving in the right direction. There was no way that she was going to concede any ground to Ann Markie now, no matter how hard her boss tried to make it for her.
51
2018 – Edinburgh
As soon as Karen had walked into the office, Jason had presented her with printouts of the only Edinburgh Evening News advertisement for a camper van that matched Joey Sutherland’s home. ‘Is this what you were after?’ he asked eagerly.
Her face had lit up as she took in the date at the top of the page. ‘Nice work, Jason.’ She tucked it into the case file and leaned back in her chair, deep in thought. Then she straightened up. ‘Next thing we need to find out is the actual date when she bought that place in Leith. The first one she did up. I need to talk to somebody at Registers of Scotland and get them to look up the historical data.’
‘I could do that,’ Jason offered. Not so long ago, he’d never have volunteered. But he was growing in confidence, becoming more assured of his ability to dig out information.
‘I know you could,’ Karen said. ‘But I’ve got another job for you. Here’s what I’m thinking, Jason. Shirley O’Shaughnessy spends time with Joey Sutherland at Invercharron. Three months later she becomes the registered owner of his van. DVLA confirms that. Although we know she’s met Joey – hung out with him, even – she doesn’t buy the van directly from him, but via a small ad in the paper. Now that is, frankly, weird. Especially since nobody seems to have seen or spoken to Joey after Invercharron.’ She raised her eyebrows interrogatively at him.
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Jason said, hoping that was the right answer.
‘Exactly. What we need to do is find out where that van was between the Invercharron weekend and the date Shirley allegedly bought it from its previous owner.’
‘She said in that interview you sent me that she lived in it that first winter she was doing places up. Parked up behind the house she bought in Leith.’
‘But even if she owned the house then, she didn’t officially own the van. If she did use Joey Sutherland to retrieve something valuable from those bikes and then killed him she was clearly determined to cover her tracks. She’s not going to then do something so careless as to put that van anywhere connected to her until she’d made everything legal at DVLA. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘Kind of. So where do you think the van was?’
Karen shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
Jason laughed. ‘I doubt it, boss.’
She shook her head, amused. ‘Where do you hide a needle?’
‘In a haystack?’ Now he was confident.
‘No, Jason.’
Puzzled again, he scratched his head. ‘Eh?’
‘You hide a needle in a case of needles.’
Light dawned. ‘A caravan site,’ he said. ‘You’d stick it on a caravan site.’
‘Exactly. I know this might be a wild goose chase, because we’re looking at a long time ago, but I want you to check out caravan sites that were around in 1995.’
Dismayed, he protested. ‘There must be hundreds.’
‘She won’t have gone far from Edinburgh. She had to be able to access it easily when it was time to move it officially to Leith. Start with a twenty-mile radius, Jason.’
His heart sank. Start with? ‘Even if I can get a list, nobody will remember one van twenty-odd years ago.’
‘They might if it sat on their site for three months and had an attractive American owner. It’s got to be worth a shot.’
‘Aye, OK. But what exactly does it prove if we do find out where it was?’ He was still struggling to figure out what was going on in his boss’s head.
‘It’s another brick in the wall, Jason. And what do we do here?’
‘One brick at a time,’ he sighed, resigned to his fate. He turned to frown at his computer. What did people do when they wanted to find somewhere to park their caravan before there was an internet? He’d only been a lad back then; he’d never had to think about things like that. He glanced over his shoulder but Karen was already engrossed in her own research. Quickly he sent a text to his mother:
See when I was wee and we went our holidays in a caravan? How did you and dad find out about caravan sites? Before the internet, I mean.
Whatever his mother was doing, she always put it aside for her sons. Within a couple of minutes, a message whizzed back:
Guide Books. Out of the library. The Caravan Club had a magazine as well, but after your dad bought it one year he found out that was mainly for folk with their own caravan, not people like us just wanting to rent something for a week or two. We had some lovely holidays in caravans, remember? There was that time at Stonehaven, you were never off the beach. Are you coming for your tea on Sunday? Love, Mum.
Of course. The library. And now he’d discovered how easy it was to ask a librarian without actually having to feel awkward fronting them up, he could do that no bother. He sent his mother a quick thanks, ignoring the Sunday dinner inquiry. That could wait.
Jason connected to the service and carefully composed his question.
I’m looking for a directory of caravan sites and/or caravan pitches for hire in a twenty-mile radius of Edinburgh in 1995. Do you have anything that would help me? Thank you. DC Jason Murray, Historic Cases Unit, Police Scotland.
He sent it off and wondered how to look busy while waiting for an answer. Karen was deep into a phone call with somebody about property transfers, so at least he had some breathing space. He decided that what he needed was sugar, so he headed out for the vending machine outside the CID office in the main building.
By the time he returned, a half-eaten Snickers bar in his hand, Karen was adding a note to the corkboard next to her desk. ‘I thought I was going to struggle,’ she said. ‘The guy I got on the phone sounded like he’d been there since the days of the Town Guard.’ Seeing his look of bewilderment, she added, ‘What they had in Edinburgh three hundred years ago before they had proper polis. But I misjudged the poor man. He was sharp as one of my dad’s chisels. All those historic transactions and transfers have been digitised so the info’s only a mouse-click away.’ She pointed at the note. ‘Ownership of the Leith property was registered in Shirley O’Shaughnessy’s name on December fourth, 1995.’
‘Four days before the ad went into the paper.’
‘Exactly. And thirteen days before the van was registered in her name. At which point, she could legitimately park it in her own backyard.’
Jason nodded. That all made sense. But something was still bothering him. ‘Why did she wait so long? Why did she not go ahead and buy the house and pretend she’d bought the van as soon as she’d killed him?’
Karen rewarded his question with a smile. ‘I can think of two reasons.’ She raised her eyebrows, giving him the opportunity to come up with one or more himself. But there were limits to the progress Jason had made and he was stumped.
He screwed up his face in rueful puzzlement. ‘Not a scooby,’ he said.
‘Put yourself in her shoes. She’s murdered a man she might reasonably expect to be missed. He was well known on the Highland games circuit. I imagine she’d have found out where he was due next so she could keep an eye out and see whether he turned up as a missing person in the local paper. If I was her, I’d have waited a few weeks at least to make sure nobody was looking for Joey, or if they were, they weren’t looking at her.’
‘That makes sense,’ Jason acknowledged. ‘What was the other reason?’
‘She had a plan. She had a use for the van, otherwise she’d have forged Joey’s signature earlier and sold it on to some unsuspecting dealer or punter, no?’
‘Aye, she wanted somewhere to live on site while she was doing up the house.�
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‘Right. But she didn’t buy a house right away, did she?’
Jason shrugged. ‘Maybe there was nothing on the market that fitted the bill for what she had in mind.’
‘That’s possible. But maybe it’s as simple as her not having the money. Maybe she needed whatever was in that bike pannier to raise the capital she needed. So she had to put the van in cold storage till she could turn the loot into cash to get started. And that, Jason, is why it’s so crucial that we find out where that van was before it turned up in Leith with her name on the paperwork. So we can connect her to it at a time when she had no business being connected to it. Oh, and we need to get the original paperwork from DVLA. She must have forged Joey’s signature. We need to let the document examiners loose on that.’
‘You want me to sort that as well? I can do that while I’m waiting for the library to get back to me.’
‘Perfect.’ Before she could say more, McCartney arrived, a swagger in his walk.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought Plummer in. He’s in interview room three with his solicitor.’
Karen looked up from her screen. ‘Any luck with the ID parade?’
‘I’ve managed to persuade two of the victims to come in. One from 1983, one from 1984.’
‘If it’s Plummer, how come he stopped?’ Jason said.
Karen sighed. ‘He probably didn’t stop. He just wised up. DNA only hit the headlines as a way of identifying criminals in 1987. It’s entirely possible he’s been raping and battering sex workers on and off for the last thirty years. The women who work on the streets often don’t report what happens to them. They think we don’t take them seriously.’ She shook her head. ‘Mostly, they’re probably right.’ She stood up. ‘Right then, let’s see what Plummer has to say for himself. Jason, you know what you’ve got to do, right?’
