by Val McDermid
‘OK, I’ll look forward to hearing from you. I really enjoyed spending time with you the other evening. I don’t often relax with someone so soon after meeting them.’
Karen made a rueful face at the phone. She’d felt the same. But what she’d learned about the earrings had undermined that. ‘I know what you mean,’ she said, deliberately evasive. ‘Leave it with me, Hamish.’
‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed, Karen. By the way, are you making progress with the Joey Sutherland case?’
He’d left it to the last possible moment if that had been the main purpose of his call. ‘Slowly,’ she said. ‘These things always take time. It’s not easy, having to rely on people’s distant memories. But we’ll get there. Trust me on that, Hamish. We’ll get there.’
‘Good to hear. I’ll let you get on, Karen. I look forward to hearing from you.’
She felt sure he meant it. But she was less certain of his motives.
58
2018 – Edinburgh
After Hamish’s call, Karen couldn’t settle. The forced inactivity of waiting for the next break in a case always drove her stir crazy, but to her frustration, she couldn’t stop turning over her conversation with Hamish. Why was she letting him get under her skin like this? She wasn’t looking for any emotional complications in her life and she certainly didn’t need a man to make her feel complete. She might not be skipping through her life in a state of ditzy happiness, but she was doing fine.
Grumbling under her breath, she pulled on her coat and left the office, running the gauntlet of dark looks and darker mutterings from those she passed on the way out. The sun was losing its battle with the thin grey clouds rolling in from the Forth, but there was still a bit of warmth in the air. She turned down Leith Walk and set off at a brisk pace. Time to find a quiet corner where she’d be safe from the disparagement of officers quick to blame her for Barry Plummer’s death.
It was a busy time of day in Aleppo. Parents stopping by for a coffee on the way to picking up the kids from school; the self-employed sneaking out for a break from their own four walls; a quartet of pensioners who met every day to while away an hour playing dominos; and the Syrian refugees who had nowhere else to go that had the feel of home. There wasn’t a free table, and Karen ended up on a stool at the counter. She wasn’t in the mood for more coffee, so she ordered a sparkling water and a couple of ma’amoul. Amena served her, gesturing to the star-shaped pastries studded with almonds and sesame seeds. ‘Fresh baked this afternoon,’ she said.
‘Dates or figs?’
Amena smiled. ‘Dates, how you like them.’
Karen bit into the pastry and savoured the burst of flavour that filled her mouth. ‘Oh, that’s the business,’ she said, feeling her tetchy mood soothed by the sweetness.
‘Makes you smile.’ Amena turned away to serve someone else. The rush soon died down and she returned to refill Karen’s glass.
‘You’re busy today,’ Karen said.
‘Is good. Maybe we open another café, Miran says.’ She patted Karen’s hand. ‘Thank you.’
Karen felt awkward, as she always did when the Syrians insisted on holding her responsible for their enterprise. ‘I opened the door. You guys did all the hard work.’
‘Miran has a cousin in London. People there are not kind like here. We are lucky we are not there.’
Karen smiled. ‘It doesn’t make up for what you went through in Syria, but I’m glad you feel that way.’
Amena nodded. ‘Last time you were here, the women you talked to?’
‘You remember them?’
She pointed to the wooden rack by the door that held copies of a free daily newspaper. ‘I see photo of the one who paid. It says she’s dead?’ Amena shook her head in bewilderment.
‘That’s right. She was murdered.’
Amena’s distress was obvious. Karen imagined it must have shaken her, to be confronted with violence again, after she thought she’d reached a place of safety. ‘This is terrible. Who has killed her?’
‘We’re not sure yet. It’s complicated.’
Amena picked up a cloth and started wiping down the counter. ‘She was upset after you spoke to her.’
Karen, who hadn’t waited to see the effect of her warning, was intrigued. ‘Did she say something?’
‘Not to me. But after you go, her friend comes back in. She was angry. She was loud. She ask the other one what you said.’
Karen’s attention quickened still further. ‘Did you hear her friend’s answer.’
Amena nodded doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure I understand. She sort of laughed and said, “That detective thinks you’re planning to murder him. And you’re setting me up as a witness for the defence.”’
Karen couldn’t quite believe it. Testimony that proved Dandy Muir had made Willow Henderson aware that she’d not be able to carry out her plans without suspicion attaching to her. Testimony that gave Willow a motive for double murder. But how had Amena remembered something so precisely when her English was far from fluent? ‘Are you sure?’ Karen asked, cautious.
Amena gave one sharp nod. ‘I understand better than I speak.’ Then a shy smile. ‘We watch a lot of cop shows, me and Miran’s mother. Maybe it seems strange to you, because of all that happen to us. But we like when bad people get what they deserve.’
‘And you’re sure that’s what the woman said?’
‘I am sure. I remember because it’s a strange thing to say. Scottish people don’t talk about murder in here.’ She pulled a wry face. ‘Only us. The Syrians.’
It was significant, Karen knew. But was it enough? ‘Did you hear them say anything else?’
Amena shook her head. ‘The one who comes back in, she looks worried. She goes quiet. She puts a hand on her friend’s arm and says something in her ear. Then her friend asks to pay. I take her money and they go. They are talking to each other, but quiet.’
‘What you heard? It could be important, Amena. I have to tell what you heard to the detective who is investigating the case.’ Karen spoke gently, but still Amena’s eyes widened in alarm.
‘I don’t want to talk to police.’
‘You talk to me all the time. This detective, he’s a good man. Nobody is going to threaten you, Amena. Nobody. I promise.’
‘I need to talk to Miran.’ She looked around, wildly seeking her husband.
‘Of course. Talk to Miran. He can be with you when you speak to us. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Amena.’ Already her mind was racing ahead. She needed to talk to Jimmy. This might be what he needed to persuade the fiscal’s office to charge Willow Henderson. If it came to court, the prosecution could claim Amena was a vulnerable witness and try to spare her the full weight of a hostile cross-examination. Karen leaned across the counter and took Amena’s hand. ‘This is a good thing you can do, Amena. Nobody knows better than you that people shouldn’t get away with murder.’
They’d left it that Karen would speak to Jimmy, then talk again to Miran and Amena. Miran was as anxious as his wife about a close encounter with the police, but his hesitancy was tempered by the trust Karen had built up with him and his community in the struggle to get the café off the ground. Her commitment to helping them create a place where they could meet and support each other had won her credit. That hadn’t been why she’d weighed in; she’d sensed their grief and isolation at a time when she’d been going through the same emotions. Helping them had helped her. ‘No such thing as altruism,’ she’d told River in a typically brusque brush-off when her friend had attempted to praise her for what she’d done. ‘I got a lot more than I gave. Plus a constant source of good coffee.’
Later that evening, Karen met Jimmy Hutton in a bar a few streets away from the house where Dandy Muir had lived with her husband and two teenage children. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked, placing a glass of tonic water in front of him.
He grimaced as the naked tonic hit his tastebuds. ‘Not great. We’ve been canvassing the neighbours, to see whether
any of them had any significant conversation with Dandy. But we’ve drawn a blank. I’m going back with Jacqui in a wee while to talk again to the husband and the kids. I can’t believe she said nothing to anybody.’
‘I might have a wee bit of help for you,’ Karen said, and repeated her conversation with Amena.
Jimmy listened keenly, his brow creased. ‘It backs up what we’re thinking, you’re right on that score. The big question is whether it’s enough to get us over the line.’
‘She heard Dandy tell Willow that I’d warned her. If Willow went ahead and killed Logan, Dandy would remember that conversation.’
‘No doubt about that. But would that be enough to persuade Willow to kill her?’
Karen shrugged. ‘If she was cold enough and determined enough to be planning to kill her husband, I’d say so.’
‘Having seen her in action, I wouldn’t argue with you.’ Jimmy fiddled with his wedding ring, as he often did when he was considering a problem. ‘I’m worried about Amena as a witness, though. She could get hammered on the cross. They’ll go for her connection to you. How they’re so grateful, they’d do anything to help you out.’
‘I hadn’t thought about that.’ Karen was disappointed in herself. She’d been so busy weighing the value of Amena’s testimony she’d forgotten to include herself in the balance. ‘You’re right, of course. So what do you think?’
Jimmy shook his head. ‘I think that’s a last resort. If we get to the end of the road and we’ve nothing better, I’ll talk to Amena and see whether I think we can make it stand up. That’s the best I can do.’
As she waited for a bus to take her back across town, Karen tried not to give in to despair. No wonder the Dog Biscuit kept going for her. Everything she’d touched lately had turned to shit. The Joey Sutherland case was hanging by a thread. Barry Plummer was lying in the morgue. Her best efforts at preventing a murder had probably laid a death sentence on Dandy Muir, and Karen had completely failed in her attempts to resolve an innocent woman’s murder. Maybe Markie was right. Maybe she wasn’t up to the job after all.
59
2018 – Gartcosh
Although it was almost nine o’clock when Karen and Jimmy arrived at the forensics unit at Gartcosh, she’d had no hesitation in responding to the phone call that had cut through her despondency. The rain was sheeting down, but by that time of night, Jimmy found a parking space close to the entrance. ‘See in future?’ he said as they strode down the corridor to Tamsin’s lab. ‘I’m always going to come here at this time of night. Save myself the fifteen-minute drive around to find a parking space. Followed by the half-mile walk from the road after I’ve given up.’
‘We’re supposed to save the planet and get the bus.’
Jimmy snorted. ‘What bus?’
‘Exactly.’
Tamsin was waiting for them in her little cubbyhole off the main lab. ‘You guys got lucky,’ she said. ‘See this little beaut?’ She pointed to a wide screen on a table by her desk. The only thing that distinguished it from every other screen in the place was that it sat on a lumpy black plastic plinth with a USB slot on the front of it.
‘It looks like a screen,’ Jimmy said.
‘I see how you got to be a DCI,’ Tamsin said. She clicked a switch and the screen sprang to life. She quickly entered the details demanded by the system – her ID, the case number and when it asked for the investigating officer, she typed in ‘DCI James Hutton’. Then she took a phone in an evidence bag out of the drawer and through a hole in the bottom of the bag, she plugged in a cable which she attached to the USB port.
‘This lovely bit of kit arrived a couple of days ago. If it does what it says on the tin, there’ll be another forty on order. They’re so simple to use, you don’t even need a digital forensics tech. Plug in the phone and this monster busts right through the password protection and strips out every last bit of data on the phone.’ She tapped the screen and a list of all the items on the phone appeared on the screen. Contacts, calls made and received, text messages, emails, apps and more.
‘Just like that?’ Karen could hardly believe it. ‘You didn’t download this already?’
‘I did, but that’s on a separate back-up. I wanted to show you, this is how it works in real time, and this is Dandy Muir’s phone. This is going to transform our work here in digital forensics. It’s going to go through the queue like a knife through butter. No more waiting six months to get the data off a phone. And like I said, there’s going to be forty of them spread round the country. It’s a fucking bonanza.’ Tamsin grinned gleefully.
‘We’ll have to make sure you don’t do a Facebook and let the data slip out the back door,’ Karen said.
Tamsin poked her tongue out at Karen. ‘It’s not networked. It’s a standalone. You have to take the data off it on a memory stick or burn it to a disk.’
‘So what has Dandy’s phone got for us?’ Jimmy asked.
‘I checked everything after the timing you gave me for Karen’s mighty intervention. Jeez, did she write some boring emails. But nothing about the Hendersons. Not a cheep. She didn’t even tell anybody she was going round there. The nearest she came to that was a text to her son telling him there was a pizza in the fridge for his dinner, that she wouldn’t be back late and he should do his homework.’ She pulled a face. ‘Not exactly the last words you’d like from your mother.’
‘So why are we here? If she didn’t tell anybody what Karen said and she didn’t tell anybody where she was going or why?’
Tamsin grinned and shook her head. ‘Oh ye of little faith. I didn’t stop with her emails and texts and entirely minimalist social media. I’m better than that, Jimmy.’ She tapped the icon for ‘audio/music’. ‘Wherever she listens to music, it’s not here. We’ve got some audio books, a couple of playlists that my grandmother would be ashamed of. And this lovely little gem.’
She gently placed her finger beside a file identified only by a string of numbers. ‘Are you ready for this?’
‘You’re such a tease,’ Karen said.
‘If I’d said that, you’d be making a complaint,’ Jimmy grumbled. ‘Come on then, Tamsin, let’s hear it.’
She activated the file. A few seconds of silence, then a scuffling, then a muffled, ‘Yes, I’m coming, Willow.’ Then a rhythmic swishing. Tamsin pressed pause.
‘So, Dandy turns on the voice recording function on her phone. She puts it in her pocket, speaks to Willow and walks to catch her up. I’m guessing this is them arriving at the Henderson house and Dandy hanging back to set up the phone.’ Tamsin set it running again.
More swishing, then they could barely make out Dandy saying, ‘Is that his car?’
Then Willow, her voice sounding as if it was coming from under water. ‘Yes, he had to trade in the Beamer for a Seat. A bit of a come-down.’ A rattle of keys.
Something indistinguishable from Dandy, then, ‘ … let yourself in?’
‘It’s my house, Dandy.’ More unidentifiable noises, then a change in the acoustic. The sound of brisk heels on parquet times two.
Then a man’s voice: ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Loud and clear.
‘I’ve come to get my house back,’ Willow said. Next, a clatter. Then the sound quality changed. It became much harder to make out the words.
Dandy’s voice said something, then she shouted ‘ … put the knives down.’
Now Logan Henderson again. Muffled. More than one voice at a time. Something like, ‘Put the fucking knives down.’
A confusion of shouts and screams, a roar of anger, the thud of a body hitting the floor in the midst of it, then Dandy’s voice rising above the melee in a keening wail. There were words but they were gibberish.
Then a definite shout from Dandy. ‘Oh no! No!’ A shout from Dandy. Women’s voices, indistinct. A confusion of heels on tiles. Dandy screaming something incomprehensible. Swishing and a sudden thump then silence.
‘That’s the end of it,’ Tamsin said. ‘I think she h
it the ground and the impact turned the recording off. Is that helpful?’
‘She definitely said “knives”, didn’t she?’ Karen said. ‘Dandy definitely said “knives”, plural.’
‘Hard to be sure,’ said Jimmy, his face sombre. ‘But I think so.’
‘We’ve got people who can clean it up,’ Tamsin said. ‘I betcha they’ll be able to give you a script of what went down in that kitchen. But I’m with Karen: I heard “knives”.’
Jimmy nodded. ‘Well, hopefully the experts will settle Willow Henderson’s hash. Then there’ll be no need to put Amena through the wringer. Thanks, Tamsin.’
‘No worries. We’d have got to it eventually on the old system. But this little bit of magic is going to make one helluva difference. Instantaneous and comprehensive.’ She patted the top of the screen as if it was a favourite pet. ‘What we always crave in here.’
Jimmy copied Tamsin, gently stroking the machine. ‘Can you send me the file?’
‘I already did,’ she said, managing cheeky and smug at the same time.
The rain had eased off and Karen and Jimmy walked back to the car. ‘It looks pretty certain you’re going to get her. I’m glad about that,’ Karen said. ‘But it doesn’t make me feel any less guilty. If I hadn’t stuck my nose in, Dandy Muir would still be alive.’
‘You can’t think like that, Karen. It’ll paralyse you. Look at it this way: Logan Henderson is going to live. If you hadn’t stepped in, he might well be dead right now.’
‘It’s not a trade-off, Jimmy. I can’t help feeling I could have handled it better. Phil would have found a way.’
‘I think Phil would have done exactly what you did. I certainly would have. Don’t put him on a pedestal, Karen. He was a good cop, but not even the best of us get the right result every time. You’re a hell of a cop. Phil was so proud of you, and he’d be proud of you still.’
Karen shook her head. ‘You think? I’ve got two bodies on my conscience this week. I should have kept McCartney on a tighter rein, I should have spoken to Logan Henderson, not Dandy Muir.’
