by Val McDermid
‘Aye, boss.’ He turned back to his computer as Karen and McCartney left the room.
‘What’s the Boy Wonder up to, then?’ McCartney asked casually as they walked into the main part of the station.
‘Dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s,’ Karen said. ‘Nothing for you to worry your pretty little head about. There’s plenty here for you to be going on with.’ She gave him her sweetest smile. ‘You can leave the big picture to me.’
52
2018 – Edinburgh
Barry Plummer thrust out his chin and squared his shoulders as they walked into the interview room, as if to say, ‘I’m an upstanding regular guy with nothing to hide.’ What Karen saw was the kind of middle-aged guy you wouldn’t give a second glance wherever you encountered him. But when she did give him a second glance, she saw muscles bunching as he clenched and unclenched his jaw. Raw red patches at the side of his fingernails where he’d chewed the skin. The twitchy bounce of his left leg as he tried to contain his anxiety. And his solicitor was a woman. It was such a sex offender cliché – get a woman to defend you, because surely a woman would never defend a man who’d committed a grievous sexual assault.
Karen drew back the chair opposite Plummer and switched on the recording equipment without saying a word. She introduced herself and McCartney, then said, ‘Also present is Barry Plummer and—sorry, I don’t know your name?’
‘I’m Sujata Chatterjee, Mr Plummer’s solicitor. I understood this was simply a further clarification of the interview my client had with Sergeant McCartney last week?’ She had a nasal Glasgow twang, the sort of voice that always sounds like a challenge.
‘Not quite. This will be an interview under caution,’ Karen said. She inclined her head towards McCartney, who solemnly intoned the familiar admonition.
‘Wait a minute,’ Plummer said. ‘Are you arresting me, or what?’
‘As I said, we want to interview you under caution so there can be no doubt about what’s asked and answered.’ Karen spoke firmly.
Plummer turned to his lawyer. ‘Do I have to answer them?’
‘You can say “no comment” to any question you don’t want to answer,’ she said. ‘This is Scotland. The court can draw no adverse implication from a “no comment”. You’re not under arrest and you can leave whenever you want to.’
Karen smiled. It was the kind of smile that makes small children whimper and cling to their mother’s legs. ‘Of course, if you did decide to leave, we probably would arrest you.’
Plummer shifted in his seat and folded his arms across his narrow chest. ‘Fine. Ask away. I’ve got nothing to hide.’
Without taking her eyes off Plummer, Karen held out a hand to McCartney and he gave her a thin manila folder. She opened it and took out two sheets of paper. Each contained the black-and-white barcode of a DNA sample. She tapped one. ‘This is the DNA sample taken from a rape victim in 1985. We believe this was one of a series of violent rapes that took place over a period of years.’ She tapped the other sheet of paper. ‘This is the DNA sample taken by Sergeant McCartney from your client last week.’ A pause. ‘As you can see, they’re a perfect match.’ Plummer blinked furiously. He pursed his lips so tightly the skin around them turned white.
She leaned forwards, linking the fingers of her hands. ‘I wonder, Mr Plummer, how you explain that?’
Plummer leaned towards his solicitor and mumbled something in her ear. She nodded and said, ‘Was the victim of this alleged crime a sex worker?’
‘Rape is rape, regardless of whether a woman is a sex worker or not.’
‘I’m well aware of that, DCI Pirie. That was not my point. I ask again, was this victim a sex worker?’
Karen knew exactly where this was going. But she couldn’t evade the question. ‘We believe so, Ms Chatterjee.’
Plummer muttered in his lawyer’s ear again. She nodded. He cleared his throat. ‘I use prostitutes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a very powerful sex drive.’ A tiny smirk. ‘So I might well have been with this woman. Doesn’t mean I raped her. I’ve always paid my way. Know what I mean?’ He leaned back, suddenly sure of himself.
‘That’s quite a coincidence. A viciously beaten rape victim with your DNA inside her, and you just happen to have had a consensual sexual transaction with her on the same night?’ Karen kept her voice level, refusing to betray her contempt for Plummer.
‘Coincidences happen, DCI Pirie.’ Chatterjee was right in there.
‘I wonder what a jury would make of it?’
Chatterjee gave a light polite laugh. ‘I don’t see this ever reaching a jury. Man has sex with prostitute? It’s hardly hold-the-front-page material, is it? I think you’re going to need a lot more evidence than that.’
‘And that’s exactly what we intend to acquire. Sergeant McCartney has made arrangements for an ID parade to take place this morning, here in the police station. What we need from you, Mr Plummer—’
‘I’m not doing that,’ he said indignantly. ‘You’re talking about crimes that took place thirty years ago. I look nothing like I did then.’ His face was tight, either with anger or fear, Karen couldn’t decide. What she did know was that beak of a nose couldn’t have changed much over the years. She was confident he was still recognisable.
‘I must protest.’ Chatterjee added her voice to the complaint. ‘My client is right. Any identification after so long an interval is seriously questionable. I doubt it would have any probative value and frankly it’s a waste of time and money.’
‘Well, you’re getting paid for your time, and how I spend my budget is my business,’ Karen said. ‘All we need from Mr Plummer is a few moments in front of a video camera and then we’ll take a short time to set up the VIPER system.’
‘A few minutes? A short time? You’ve been planning this,’ Chatterjee said.
‘We’d be negligent if we—’
‘What the hell is the VIPER system?’ Plummer cut in. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
‘It’s very simple,’ Karen said, in the tone of someone explaining to a small and rather unintelligent child. ‘VIPER stands for Video Identification Parade Electronic Recording. It’s a system we’ve been using for the last fifteen years. We have a huge database of videos of people from all over the UK. We video them looking at the camera then turning to the side to show their profiles. We’ve got a team of experts who put together a package of men who resemble you. Then we’re going to film you doing the identical thing – face on, then turning your head. And then an officer who’s never seen you and doesn’t know which video is you will show the victims the set of films.’
‘I’m not doing that.’ Plummer pushed his chair back and half-rose before his lawyer patted his arm, indicating he should sit down. He fell back, scowling. ‘I’m not doing that. You can’t make me.’
‘Here’s how this plays out, Mr Plummer,’ Karen said, her voice low and pleasant. ‘Either you cooperate willingly, or I arrest you. Once I’ve arrested you, the law allows Police Scotland to photograph you. Once we’ve done that, we can make up a pack of a dozen photographs of men who look like you and show them to the witnesses. Same end result, only you’ve used up any possible fragment of goodwill you might have earned by helping us out. Plus you’re under arrest and held in custody. Now, I suspect you’ve failed to mention to your wife and kids and workmates that you were coming here today. When you don’t turn up at home at your usual time, your wife might get concerned. She might call her local police station and report you missing. And then they might tell her that you’re in custody, being questioned over the rape of a prostitute you’ve already admitted having sex with.’
‘This is outrageous,’ Chatterjee complained. ‘How dare you threaten my client.’
‘Believe me, Ms Chatterjee, if I was threatening your client, he’d know all about it. I was merely explaining to Mr Plummer the choices that are presently available to him. I believe in making informed choices, don’t you, Ms Chatterjee?’
The lawye
r glared at her, but Karen had left her nothing to grab hold of.
‘So what’s it to be, Mr Plummer? The primrose path or the hard road?’
In the end, it turned out to make no difference. Neither of the two victims was able to make a positive identification of Barry Plummer. One thought it was him but couldn’t swear to it. The other, a woman wasted by years of drugs and drink and poverty, had not a clue. And even if she had, Karen knew she’d have made a terrible witness. No fiscal would have entertained a prosecution based on her testimony.
Karen and McCartney were in the HCU office when the VIPER officer came down to break the bad news. Neither had really believed they’d get a definitive result from the witnesses, but Karen had clung to the hope they might get enough to put pressure on Plummer.
This was the hardest part of working cold cases. You reviewed an unsolved crime, or some new evidence surfaced – the car registration, for example. You got a bit further down the road towards a solution. Sometimes, like today, you had a suspect your years of experience told you was almost certainly the one. But then you hit a brick wall. A different brick wall from the one the original investigators had encountered, but one that was equally solid.
‘What do we do now?’ McCartney answered.
Karen shook her head. ‘I think we’re screwed. I don’t see another angle. The DNA’s not enough. If the victim hadn’t been a sex worker, it would maybe have taken us across the line. But Plummer’s got a legitimate answer to that. The only other possibility is to go through the evidence warehouse box by box to see if we can find the samples from the other cases. That would take weeks, and even if we do find them, there’s no guarantee it’ll secure a conviction. I hate walking away from something because it’s a budget-buster. But this is a no-brainer. We have to let it go.’
McCartney kicked the bin by his desk. It bounced off the bottom drawer with a sound like a cracked bell. ‘Bastard,’ he said.
‘I was under the impression you thought this was a waste of time,’ Karen said.
McCartney had the grace to look ashamed. ‘At the beginning, aye, I did. But Plummer set my alarm bells ringing. He didn’t smell right, know what I mean? And I went and talked to Kay McAfee’s parents. Just to see whether any other details had surfaced over the years.’ He scoffed, his mouth a twisted smile.
‘Makes it real, doesn’t it? When you talk to the people that have somebody to grieve for.’
He nodded. ‘They never gave up hope, her mum and dad. Her old man in particular. He’s well into his sixties now, but he’s still fierce. He feels like they let Kay down when she was in her teens. She ran wild. You know how it goes. They’re ordinary working class folk from a wee town in West Lothian, they had no idea how to cope. So they did the “under our roof, you play by our rules”, and Kay was offski. And the next thing they know is the polis are at the door, then the doctor’s saying their lassie’s going to be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life and, by the way, she’s not going to be able to talk to you either.’
‘That’s hard.’
‘Aye. So Billy McAfee has had thirty years of guilt as well as thirty years of rage.’ McCartney ran a hand along his clean-shaven jaw. ‘Talking to him, seeing that pain? I kind of got it. What you said about not wanting the people left behind to suffer one more day than necessary. And I wanted to nail Plummer for Billy McAfee.’
To her surprise, Karen felt moved by McCartney’s admission. Maybe she could make something of him yet, if she could convince him that she was the one on the side of the angels rather than the Dog Biscuit. ‘We can’t charge Plummer, obviously. But let’s make him sweat a wee bit. Away and tell Ms Chatterjee that we need to rerun VIPER. We’ll keep him hanging around for a few hours yet. Maybe long enough to make things a bit uncomfortable for him at home.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Seems like the least we can do.’
53
2018 – Edinburgh
Left to her own devices, Karen turned her mind to the Joey Sutherland case. She reread everything the internet had provided but kept coming back to what the magazine profile had said about the dawn of O’Shaughnessy’s property empire. According to the journalist, she’d started the business with money she’d inherited from her grandfather. If that had been the case, why did she wait so long to get going? It had taken her till halfway through her second year at Napier before she’d made her first foray into the property market.
Maybe she’d felt she had to get a better grasp of business principles before she dived in at the deep end. That was a reasonable explanation. Even a mind as naturally suspicious as Karen’s had to concede that.
But maybe it was because the woman hadn’t actually had the capital till much later. If the truly valuable part of her inheritance had been buried under a Highland peat bog, that would explain why she’d had to wait until she could find someone like Joey Sutherland to unearth it for her.
Karen had once watched All the President’s Men on a wobbly VHS tape her dad had borrowed from the video rental shop years before. Her first case as a detective had turned on a forged will. While they’d been digging around the edges of the case, she’d remembered the coarse rasp of Deep Throat’s voice as he’d exhorted Bernstein and Woodward to ‘follow the money’. It had been the route to resolving that case, and it had remained one of the tools in her investigative box ever since.
The time had definitely come to follow Shirley O’Shaughnessy’s money. But how was she going to check it out? If they ever got a case they could take to the Procurator Fiscal, forensic accountants would dissect every penny that had flowed through O’Shaughnessy’s company and private accounts. But Karen didn’t have that sort of expertise at her command.
If O’Shaughnessy had been Scottish, Karen would have known where to send the Mint searching for her grandfather’s will. But she had no idea how these things were done in America. She was going to have to embark on a steep learning curve.
She’d barely typed ‘American probate records’ into the search bar when McCartney returned. A quick glance at the clock revealed he’d been gone for the best part of two hours. She’d been so absorbed in researching O’Shaughnessy’s background she’d lost all track of time. ‘Is Plummer still here?’ she asked.
McCartney nodded. ‘Chatterjee’s getting kind of restive, but I pointed out she should be grateful we’re not rushing things. In her client’s best interests, and all that shite. Maybe give it another hour or so?’
Karen considered. ‘No, I think that’d be pushing it. Away and tell him to stop cluttering up our nice tidy police station.’
The sergeant looked less than happy but knew better than to argue. ‘OK. Where’s the Mint, by the way?’
Karen chuckled. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’
He grinned back at her. ‘I’m persistent. Isn’t that a good quality in cold cases?’
‘Touché. But never mind Jason, get rid of Plummer. We’ll revisit the case at the end of next week, see if either of us has had a brainwave.’
‘OK. I’ll go and have a cup of tea and a bacon roll, then I’ll give Plummer his marching orders.’
Karen turned back to her screen as he left. Time she did something that might lead them out of frustration to a result they could celebrate.
Gayfield Square, late afternoon. One of the few bits of metered parking in that part of town, so a car was cruising hopefully round the perimeter. As always, plenty of foot traffic, with people cutting through between London Street and Elm Row. A nice wee park in the middle with a couple of benches on the grass, at least one of which provided an uninterrupted view of the public entrance to the police station. And if it happened to be raining – which it wasn’t on that particular afternoon – South Gayfield Lane tucked down the side of the nick, with one or two handy doorways for shelter.
When Barry Plummer emerged with Sujata Chatterjee, they paused on the pavement outside, presumably to discuss what had happened earlier. Perhaps to develop a strategy should there be further developments. Neither
of them noticed that the occupant of one of the benches had leaped to his feet when they appeared. A compact grey-haired man dressed in jeans, trainers and a nylon blouson zipped to the neck sprinted across the park and across the street. He was upon them before either of them registered his presence.
‘You fucking bastard,’ he howled, unzipping his jacket and pulling out a long-bladed carving knife. ‘You fucker. You fucker.’ He plunged the knife into Barry Plummer’s gut.
Plummer tried to grab the handle but he missed and the blade sheared through his fingers as his assailant drew it out and struck again. Plummer’s high scream mingled with the yells of the man and the piercing wail of Sujata Chatterjee, who was battering the attacker’s back with her small fists. He didn’t seem to notice. He just kept pulling out the knife and stabbing Plummer wherever he could reach.
Plummer sank to his knees but the man didn’t stop. He stabbed at his victim’s neck and head, red-faced, spattered and smeared with blood, still swearing and shouting.
He was still shouting seconds later when half a dozen police officers ran out of the public entrance, some still struggling with their stab vests. They grabbed him from behind and clattered him to the ground, one of them stamping on his wrist, forcing him to drop the knife.
Too late. It had taken less than a minute. It was over so quickly that nobody in the square even managed to capture it on their phone. But Barry Plummer was dead. Not from a stab wound, but a heart attack.
54
2018 – Edinburgh
DC Jason Murray returned to Gayfield Square in cheerful mood to find the station in an uproar. There was a crime scene tent on the pavement outside the main entrance and a scrum of reporters barely held in check by a trio of grim-faced tackety boot boys in their hi-vis jackets. He pushed his way through to the foyer, where a uniformed sergeant behind the desk glared at him. ‘What’s going on?’ Jason asked.
