Broken Ground (Karen Pirie Book 5)

by Val McDermid

  62

  1995 – Edinburgh

  Shirley O’Shaughnessy studied the map and the sheets of paper that littered her desk and gave a soft chuckle. ‘I got you,’ she said with quiet satisfaction. It was a moment she’d been waiting for since the day she’d left Hamtramck for Edinburgh. She remembered how she’d hauled her case through to the living room where her grandfather lay on his recliner, absorbed in a replay of some historic ball game.

  He’d looked up. ‘You sure you got everything you need in there?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘I have no idea how we’re going to manage without a sink in the kitchen,’ he sighed.

  ‘Very droll,’ she said, her sarcasm gentle. ‘I’m going to miss that sense of humour.’

  ‘The Scots have their own kind of humour, Shirley. You’ll spend the first two weeks taking offence and thinking they’re mean sons of bitches, then it’s going to hit you that they’re making a joke.’

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind, Pops.’

  ‘Now come here and sit down. There’s something I need to talk to you about.’ He turned off the TV and pointed to the sofa.

  ‘Pops, I know all about boys,’ Shirley teased, but sat down nevertheless. She’d learned over the years that her grandfather didn’t waste her time with stupid homilies.

  ‘I know I’ve spoken a lot over the years about my time in Scotland. Training and being trained for going behind enemy lines. But there’s one story I haven’t told you. And you need to hear it now.’

  ‘That sounds serious.’ She could see from his face that he meant it.

  ‘You know this cancer’s going to get me, right?’

  ‘You’re going to fight it. And you’re going to win.’ She said it to convince herself as much as him.

  ‘We both know that’s not true. I’ve got a year at the outside—’

  ‘It’s not too late for me to postpone going to Edinburgh,’ she protested. Not for the first time.

  ‘I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want you here at the end. I’ve got your mom, and that’s fine. But this might be the last chance I have to pass this on to you.’

  ‘OK. What is it?’

  And he told her about the diamonds. How he’d found them in an office safe after the Nazis had cleared out. How he’d hidden them in a bike pannier, and what Kenny Pascoe and his buddy had done with the bikes. How Kenny had passed the map on to him when he knew the TB was coming for him. She suspected her expression had told him how improbable the whole thing sounded.

  ‘Why didn’t you go back for them?’ Puzzled, she stared at him.

  ‘I went back three times in the fifties,’ he said wearily. ‘I drove all round the terrain we trained on. And beyond. I couldn’t find the place. I’d find three things that lined up but then a fourth was in the wrong place. When Kenny sent me the map, he omitted to mention exactly where it was.’ He reached for an envelope on the table next to him. ‘Here’s the map. And there’s a letter with a grid of numbers on the back. I don’t know what they mean, or even if they’re anything to do with the map. But you’re a smart young lady. Maybe you can succeed where I failed.’

  She’d taken the envelope with a heavy heart. She knew it would be the last thing he ever gave her and it had felt like he was laying a quest on her, like some medieval knight in a Dungeons and Dragons game. She’d promised to do her best, but until now she’d failed.

  She’d read books about cryptography. She’d hung out with mathematicians. She’d tried making sense of the numbers as grid references on Ordnance Survey maps. As a last resort, she’d even joined the rambling society because they were going on a walking trip to Wester Ross. And that had been the unlikely place where she’d found the answer. A few of them had gone to the pub after a Sunday afternoon walk in the Pentlands and she’d noticed one of the men scribbling down two sets of numbers for another. Two sets of seven digits.

  ‘What’s that?’ She’d spoken so sharply that they’d straightened up, startled and guilty as schoolboys caught looking at dirty photos.

  ‘It’s longitude and latitude,’ one said. ‘We’re trying to work something out for a competition entry.’

  ‘Explain it to me,’ she demanded.

  ‘Conventionally, you give longitude then latitude. Degrees, minutes and seconds to one decimal point. This here is forty-three degrees, two minutes, five point three seconds.’

  She frowned intently at the numbers. ‘How do you know if it’s north or south?’

  ‘Usually there would be an N or an S at the end. An E or a W for the latitude. That’s part of the competition. You have to decide which spot it’s referring to.’

  She’d jumped up, leaned across the table and planted a kiss on his lips. Then she was gone, leaving a half-finished drink and an open-mouthed student behind her.

  It had taken her every spare minute for a week to work out which were the real coordinates and which the red herrings. But now at last she was looking at the answer. It had come too late for her grandfather. Not for her, though. Shirley had dreams, and now the means to pursue them was almost within her grasp. She was going to leave something behind more lasting than anyone in her entire family had ever managed.

  All she had to do was figure out how to get the damn bikes out of the ground. And she had an idea about that too. Over the summer, one of her fellow students had invited her to visit her home in Braemar. The family had taken her to the Gathering, where the Queen herself had presided over the Highland games. Which was pretty amazing on its own. It was as if the President would have shown up at Tiger Stadium to watch a ball game.

  What caught Shirley’s eye – apart from the royal party with their tartan rugs spread over their knees the same as all the ordinary folks watching the action – were the heavy athletes. They were like a gift from the gods. These guys weren’t only strong enough to do what she needed done. She gleaned from her friend’s brother that they were guns for hire, going from town to town to ply their strongman trade. How much would it take to persuade one of them to do a job for her?

  And did she have the nerve to make sure he’d keep his mouth shut afterwards?

  63

  2018 – Glasgow

  Michael Moss had suggested meeting Karen in the Centre for Contemporary Arts on Sauchiehall Street. ‘I’ve got to be at the Garnethill Synagogue till three o’clock,’ he’d explained on the phone. ‘So that would suit me best. They’ve got a nice café.’

  Karen hadn’t been at that end of Glasgow city centre for years. The art school had always left its mark on the area, but now the streets seemed to have been entirely colonised by students. She imagined Sauchiehall Street would come alive at night when the student flats and residences emptied, and the bars and kebab shops filled with a clientele determined to make the most of their last chance at irresponsibility.

  But at this time in the afternoon, the populace were scuttling past, hoods up against the rain. She couldn’t blame them; it was a day for getting indoors as fast as possible. Karen was a firm subscriber to the East Coast view that it always rained in Glasgow. She couldn’t understand why a local dialect that had about forty words for being intoxicated didn’t have the same number for types and conditions of rain. Maybe they were all too pissed to notice.

  The café was half-empty, and Karen chose a table for two to one side. She sat facing the door, waiting to spot Michael Moss. ‘I’ll be wearing a black raincoat and a black porkpie hat,’ he’d told her. She’d had to check on the internet what precisely a porkpie hat looked like.

  She’d found Moss via the same route. Her researches into UK diamond merchants had brought her to the London Diamond Index, which claimed to be the association to which the overwhelming majority of diamond dealers was affiliated. These were the people who bought and sold stones, both cut and uncut, supplying the jewellery trade. The list of their members included Michael Moss in Glasgow, so she’d called him. ‘I’m semi-retired now,’ he’d told her. ‘But I’m happy to help yo
u if I can.’ And so they’d arranged to meet.

  Karen smothered a yawn with the back of her hand. The night was catching up with her. She had no confidence that this encounter would take her a single step closer to nailing Shirley O’Shaughnessy, but right now it was the only road she had to go down. As she fretted over what Jason might uncover about Hamish Mackenzie, an elderly man swept into the room. His black raincoat looked as if it had been tailored for his tall, spare frame by a costume designer from the heyday of film noir. It swept around him in elegant drapes and folds shaped by his every step. The hat was indeed a porkpie, but it was made of black leather that seemed to suck in the light, turning the top of his head into a kind of negative space. He was dashing. There was no other word for it.

  Karen raised a hand and gave a wonky wave, standing up to greet him. ‘Mr Moss?’

  ‘And you must be Detective Chief Inspector Pirie.’ He gave her title full weight, taking her hand and bowing over it. ‘I hope I haven’t kept you waiting?’ His face was an angular arrangement of planes as pale as the vellum in a medieval manuscript. His eyes were hazel, magnified through large horn-rimmed glasses. Karen liked him on sight.

  ‘You’re very prompt,’ she said. ‘Let me get you a coffee.’

  ‘Just a glass of sparkling water,’ he said. ‘I can no longer indulge in coffee after the clock has struck noon.’

  She went to the counter and by the time she’d returned, he’d removed his coat and hat. His hair was a fine silver, cut close to his head like the pelt of a chinchilla. He wore a pale grey suit, a charcoal shirt and a flamboyant tie with extravagant swirls of pink and purple. On his pinkie, a diamond sparkled in a gold signet ring. She’d been expecting an orthodox Jew in traditional garb, like she’d seen in photographs of the Antwerp diamond district, but Karen was willing to acknowledge she’d been the victim of her own prejudices.

  She opened the conversational bidding. ‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to me.’

  ‘I’m intrigued. You say you think I may be able to help you with one of your historic cases?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s a long shot, I know. But sometimes that’s the only one we have. I believe that in the autumn of 1995 a young American woman sold a quantity of diamonds. I don’t even know for sure if the sale happened in the UK, but I suspect it did.’

  ‘Cut or uncut?’ he interrupted.

  ‘I don’t know that either. I believe the stones were stolen in Antwerp at the end of the Second World War and they remained hidden until 1995. I suspect they were stolen from the Nazi officers who had in turn looted them from the Jewish diamond dealers they sent to the concentration camps.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ he said. ‘Nobody wants to collude in someone getting rich from stones with that provenance. And what do you think I can do to help you?’ He sipped his water, scrutinising her over the rim of his glass, unblinking as a cautious lizard.

  Karen understood the delicacy of the ground she stood on. Anyone who had bought stones from Shirley O’Shaughnessy would themselves have made a profit on the deal in the longer term. Even if they’d known nothing of their provenance, they were still tainted by their very handling of them. ‘This must have been a pretty unusual transaction. I don’t imagine many young blonde Americans walk into the offices of diamond merchants with a bag of stones. I know it was a long time ago, but surely it’s possible that one of your colleagues might remember such a thing?’

  An elegant shrug. ‘It’s possible. As you say, it’s not the kind of thing that happens every day. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I wasn’t the dealer who bought those stones. And I never heard of such a deal. But there are a lot of us and we don’t confide much in each other about the details of our business. What are you hoping for from me?’

  ‘I don’t know how your organisation works. Can you ask around? See whether anyone remembers such a deal?’

  Elbow on the table, he leaned his chin on his fist. ‘We do have a system for communicating with each other. It’s important to be able to pass information among ourselves quickly in the event of robbery or some kind of scam.’

  ‘Do you think you could access it on my behalf?’ He was, she thought, making her work for it.

  ‘I don’t see why not. It’s been used from time to time to circulate information from the police.’ He took a small Moleskine notebook and a silver mechanical pencil from his pocket. ‘Can you go through the details again?’

  ‘Between September and Christmas 1995,’ Karen said. He turned to a fresh page and scribbled a note. ‘A young blonde American woman selling a parcel of stones.’

  He wrote, muttering, ‘Cut or uncut,’ under his breath. He looked up and met her eyes. ‘Are you going to tell me her name?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to prejudice any information that might come from this inquiry.’

  ‘Sensible. And one should also bear in mind the law of libel.’ His smile was crooked and quirky. ‘And there is nothing more you can tell me?’

  Karen shook her head. ‘It’s clutching at straws, I know.’

  ‘But when straws are all you have, what else can you do?’ He took a long swallow of his water. ‘How will this information help you? What are you investigating?’

  Karen didn’t really want to discuss the case, but sometimes you had to give a little to get a lot. ‘It’s a murder. A man was shot dead twenty-three years ago. We suspect the diamonds were the motive.’

  ‘A diamond robbery?’

  Her smile was rueful. ‘Not exactly. More a recovery than a robbery. I’m sorry, I can’t really say any more.’

  ‘That’s tantalising, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘I don’t mean to be. But if something comes of it, I promise I’ll give you the full story.’

  He inclined his head politely. ‘I’ll hold you to that. And now …’ He pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘I’m going home to send out a message to my colleagues. I will be in touch as soon as I hear anything. If I hear anything.’ He replaced his hat, slipped into his coat and strode off in an eddy of black.

  Much later that evening, Gerry McCartney huddled under the shelter of a dripping tree by the shore of Airthrey Loch, waiting for Ann Markie and her fox terrier. He’d tried to make an appointment with her that afternoon but her secretary had given him the brush-off. ‘Until your disciplinary procedure has been resolved, the ACC believes it would be inappropriate to have a meeting with you. If you want to communicate with her, she suggests you put it in writing.’

  He was furious. He’d done everything she’d asked of him, and now she was cutting him loose at the first sign of trouble. She’d left him twisting in the wind because that was the better PR option for dealing with Billy McAfee’s stupid overreaction to the news that Barry Plummer was being released. McCartney had only intended McAfee to kick up a stink with the papers, to make Karen Pirie look bad. He hadn’t thought the man would go completely mental and kill Plummer. Who could have predicted that? It wasn’t the sort of thing that happened round here. This was Scotland, not bloody Texas.

  But Markie hadn’t even given him a chance to explain what he’d been trying to achieve. All she’d cared about was keeping her own hands clean. Throwing him to the wolves had been a shit thing to do.

  Still, he thought he could turn things around. Whatever Markie’s reason for dumping him in the HCU, it had to be as valid now as then. He didn’t know or care why she wanted enough dirt on KP Nuts to pull her off cold cases and stick her into the kind of desk job that shouted loud and clear that her career was going nowhere. But want it she did, and maybe he could buy his way back into his job with the hard currency of information.

  He’d sneaked into Gayfield Square in the small hours, waiting for the changeover of the traffic patrol to slip in while they were leaving. He still had the door code for the HCU office. Between the obscure notes on Karen’s corkboard and the bits of paper on the ginger ninja’s desk, he managed to work out that they were looking at a woman called Shirley O’Shaughnessy for th
e Joey Sutherland murder. And that Shirley O’Shaughnessy was the poster girl for the Scottish government’s housing initiative.

  Arresting her for murder was, he reckoned, something Ann Markie would want to stop in its tracks. The last thing she’d want would be to piss off the politicians.

  Now he had something to bargain with. All he needed now was the woman herself. Time was trickling by and there was no sign of her. Twenty minutes crawled by. His feet were wet and his nose was so cold he couldn’t tell if it was rain or snot dripping from it. Bloody woman and her dog.

  Enough was enough. McCartney trudged back to his car, a walking lump of misery. He’d get through the weekend somehow then find Markie and make her listen to him. He’d be back in harness before his wife had even noticed he’d been suspended. He’d show Karen Pirie what it took to be a cop.

  64

  2018 – Edinburgh

  The weekend had dragged interminably. With nothing to pursue, Karen had been restless and grumpy. She’d put Hamish off till the beginning of the week and devoted herself to a long overdue deep-cleaning of her flat. So by the time Monday morning rolled round, she was raring to go. She arrived at Aleppo a few minutes before eight and settled at her favourite table at the back of the room. Miran brought her coffee as usual, a tiny shortbread disc on the saucer instead of the customary pistachio crescent. Karen picked it up, her eyebrows questioning. ‘This is new,’ she said.

  Miran chuckled. ‘We are assimilating.’

  ‘As long as you don’t stop making your own pastries,’ she grumbled. She glanced around, checking that she’d not been remiss. ‘Is Amena not in this morning?’

  ‘My mother has an appointment at the hospital so Amena has to take the children to school. Do you need to speak to her again?’

  ‘No, quite the opposite. I wanted to tell her that DCI Hutton has a new line of evidence which means he probably won’t need Amena to be a witness in court. But we’re very grateful for her helping us out.’