Broken Ground (Karen Pirie Book 5)

by Val McDermid

  There was nothing else for it. They were going to have to arrest her in a room full of people, in front of the First Minister.

  The one upside was that Markie might have a coronary.

  ‘Let’s get a Battenberg,’ she said, leading the way to a squad car, whose nickname came from the chequered pattern of blue and yellow squares along their sides. ‘If we’re going to arrest her, we need to be able to stick her in something official. You drive,’ she instructed him.

  They were halfway along Queen Street when Jason suddenly said, ‘It’s pretty neat, this case ending up in Bute House.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Do you not remember that story a couple of years ago about the chandelier in the drawing room?’

  ‘No, it’s fair to say I know nothing about the chandelier in the drawing room of Bute House.’

  ‘They think it might be Nazi loot. It was sent back by some guy who was a pal of Lady Bute. He said he found it in the street. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found a massive great crystal chandelier in the street. Anyway, Lady Bute had it restored and hung up in the drawing room. Only, this all started with Nazi loot, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She snorted with laughter and burst into song.

  ‘“The Nazi chandeliers light up the paintings on your wall.”’

  The release of tension left them both giggling, and as they turned into Charlotte Square, Jason weighed in with, ‘“When the new wears off of your Nazi chandeliers.”’

  They were still chuckling when he drew up outside Bute House. Unlike 10 Downing Street, there were no barriers to keep the public at arm’s length, and not even a police officer on the doorstep. They climbed the steps to the imposing Georgian townhouse in the centre of the blackened sandstone terrace that ran the length of the north side of the square. Jason rang the bell and the door was opened almost immediately. They both displayed their ID to the officer on security detail.

  ‘We need to speak to someone in the reception that’s going on right now,’ Karen said. ‘Is it upstairs in the drawing room?’

  He nodded and Karen headed down the hallway to the elegantly curved staircase, Jason at her heels. ‘Wait, you can’t just breenge in,’ he protested.

  Karen swung round. ‘We need to make an arrest, son. I don’t need your permission to do that.’

  He looked appalled. ‘The First Minister’s in there. You can’t— Look, I’ll get one of her people to come out and talk to you, OK?’ He pushed past and took the stairs two a time. Karen exchanged looks with Jason and followed.

  When they reached the landing, they waited. The door into the grand drawing room was standing open and beyond it they could see people standing around in little groups, deep in conversation, coffee cups in hand. Waitresses circulated with plates of tiny pastries and tablet. ‘Almost like being at home,’ Karen muttered.

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  The security officer reappeared, looking harried. A young woman followed close behind, apparently unperturbed. She smiled at them both. ‘I’m Tabitha, I work for the First Minister. How can I help you, Officers?’

  Karen introduced them, then said, ‘I know this is really awkward, but we need to arrest one of your guests. For operational reasons, we can’t wait to do it discreetly when she leaves. The last thing I want to do is to embarrass your boss, obviously. How do we do this?’

  The only sign Tabitha gave that this was anything out of the ordinary was a momentary twitch of the eyebrows. ‘Can you tell me who it is you need to … arrest?’

  Karen took a deep breath. This might be the moment where her career disappeared. She found she didn’t care. ‘Shirley O’Shaughnessy. Of City SOS Construction.’

  Now Tabitha was disconcerted. ‘You want to arrest Shirley?’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘More a surprise.’ She glanced over her shoulder, biting her lip. ‘Give me a minute, would you?’ She went back inside. Karen followed her to the threshold, peering round the edge of the door. Above the elaborate fireplace hung an ornate gilt mirror that would have covered all of Karen’s living room wall. It reflected the controversial chandelier back at the room. The First Minister was over by one of the tall windows in a knot of intense conversation, unmistakable in vertiginous heels and one of her trademark brightly coloured suits. Karen watched Tabitha cross to her side and draw her away from the group. Her face showed nothing as she listened to her aide. Then she nodded and said something in reply. She returned to the people she’d been talking to, but her eyes kept moving back to the doorway.

  When Tabitha returned, she said, ‘The First Minister asked me if it would be possible for you to make your arrest outside the room? I’ll fetch Shirley and you can speak to her here. Is that OK?’

  Karen had some misgivings, but she knew she didn’t have much choice. ‘Just don’t tell her it’s the police who want to talk to her.’

  She watched Tabitha scan the room and locate her target. She walked across and, without fuss, touched the elbow of a woman with her back to the door. When she turned. Karen recognised her at once. She looked momentarily perplexed, then let Tabitha lead her to the door.

  Karen took a couple of steps back as O’Shaughnessy approached and waited till she was properly out of the room. Jason picked up Karen’s nod towards the door, and he moved smartly past them all to close it. Abruptly the buzz of conversation diminished.

  O’Shaughnessy turned to Tabitha. ‘I thought you said—’

  Karen stepped in front of her. ‘Shirley O’Shaughnessy, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder.’

  It was hard to say who looked most astounded – Tabitha or O’Shaughnessy. ‘This is a joke, right?’ O’Shaughnessy said, the traces of her American accent still evident.

  ‘No joke, I promise you.’ Karen recited the rest of the caution while O’Shaughnessy stood shaking her head and reaching into her jacket pocket for her phone.

  ‘This is crazy. I’m calling my lawyer right now.’ She stabbed the phone with perfectly manicured burgundy fingernails.

  ‘That’s fine. Tell your lawyer to meet us at Gayfield Square police station.’

  O’Shaughnessy gave a brittle laugh and stopped dialling. ‘I’m going nowhere with you.’ She swung round, making for the door. ‘Wait till Nicola hears about this.’ But Jason barred her way, standing impassive with his hands folded in front of him.

  ‘We can do this the easy way, where you walk downstairs with us and get into the police car without a fuss,’ Karen said, matter-of-factly. ‘Or I can handcuff you and make a show of you for the photographers who will doubtless be outside waiting for their morning photo op.’

  ‘Who am I supposed to have murdered? Is this some corporate manslaughter thing?’ O’Shaughnessy was good at this. The blend of tough businesswoman and injured innocent was hard to pull off, but she was rocking the look, Karen thought.

  ‘Joey Sutherland. Remember him?’

  For a second her face froze. If Karen had blinked at the wrong moment, she’d have missed it. Then she recovered and said, ‘Never heard of him. Did he work for us? Is somebody accusing us of negligence?’

  ‘No. I’m accusing you of murder. Nothing corporate about it. Now, are you coming quietly, or are you going to make the kind of scene that’ll guarantee you never get asked back here again?’

  O’Shaughnessy looked at her with undisguised disgust. ‘You’re going to regret this for the rest of your career. Which probably is not going to be long.’

  Karen smiled. ‘You may be right. But at least I’ve had the satisfaction of this moment.’

  70

  2018 – Edinburgh

  An arrest was never the end. It was merely the end of the beginning. Karen had been far from certain that her belief in Shirley O’Shaughnessy’s guilt would be mirrored by the Procurator Fiscal’s department, particularly since she’d made the arrest without consulting them. They weren’t supposed to support any case unless it had more than a fifty per cent chance of su
ccess. But Karen had worked with Fiscal Depute Ruth Wardlaw in the past and the two women had learned to respect each other’s judgement. Wardlaw agreed there was a missing chapter in the narrative of Shirley O’Shaughnessy’s crime. ‘But I think we can bury that under the weight of the rest of the evidence.’

  ‘What about the jury? Is she not supposed to be the great white knight of housing development?’

  Ruth grinned. ‘Juries don’t love the rich. And it looks like City SOS Construction’s going to carry on with their programme regardless. That’s the joy of a really big company. Nobody’s indispensable.’

  And so it was agreed. Shirley O’Shaughnessy would face trial for the murder of Joey Sutherland. It wasn’t the only half-time result in Karen’s favour. The audio experts had cleaned up Dandy Muir’s phone recording enough to leave no doubt about the order of events in the Hendersons’ kitchen. Willow Henderson had been charged with the murder of Dandy Muir and the attempted murder of her husband. True, Billy McAfee was awaiting trial for the culpable homicide of Barry Plummer, but his brief was confident they could plead that the balance of his mind was disturbed. And she’d had a note from the First Minister thanking her for her discretion at Bute House. ‘We’ll see what she says when we come for the Nazi chandelier,’ she’d said, showing it to Jimmy Hutton.

  It wasn’t all glory and righteousness, however. Unsurprisingly, Markie had seized the credit for the HCU’s work and had backed off. But Karen knew this was a truce, not a surrender. The Dog Biscuit would be back snapping at her ankles. And Gerry McCartney was still a police officer. Not in an elite unit, it was true. But Karen knew she’d made another enemy there. Time would tell how much damage he could do her.

  And then there was Hamish. Even if Shirley O’Shaughnessy walked free at the end of her trial, Karen couldn’t help thinking that something good might yet come from the case of the body in the bog. Like an arrest, this too was only the end of a beginning.

  Epilogue

  1995 – Invercharron, Sutherland

  Joey Sutherland was no stranger to admiration. The adulation of small boys who wanted to know the secret to growing up like him; the hot curiosity of women who craved those hard muscles against their soft bodies; and the almost childlike need of grown men to be seen standing next to him at the bar, to be able to boast he was their friend. He’d learned to take it for granted. This was what came with being one of the world’s top heavy athletes.

  At Highland Games and strongman competitions on four continents, Joey and his colleagues wowed the audiences with their feats of strength. Tossing the caber, throwing the hammer, the stone, the light and the heavy weight, the sheaf – those were all impressive contests, and Joey had won plenty of them over the years. But the event where he still outshone the competition was the weight-for-height.

  A hush always shivered through the crowd when it came to the most terrifying event of the games. Joey would make great play of rubbing his palms with the rosin bag to protect him from the nightmare injuries that slippage could cause. He would check the height the bar was set at, then he’d turn his back on the two slender uprights and the crossbar. He’d plant his feet firmly apart then bend his knees, taking a firm grasp of the fifty-six-pound weight with one hand. Then he’d swing it back and forth, up and down, to build momentum, his kilt swaying dramatically with each smooth movement. Three times, and then he would release the block of iron with a prayer.

  If it went well – and so far, for Joey, it had always gone well – the weight would sail up over his head and high into the air. The crowd would gasp, the lump of iron would seem to freeze at the apex of its climb then it would descend on the far side of the bar, not even causing it to tremble. And then the crowd would roar. The world record stood an inch over nineteen feet. Joey was three inches behind.

  Sometimes it did not go well and the bar came tumbling to the ground. And sometimes it went very badly indeed. Men had died on the field in front of families no longer having a good day out. But Joey refused even to consider that as a possibility. He threw with absolute faith in his command of fifty-six pounds of iron as aerodynamic as a breezeblock.

  The afternoon at Invercharron had gone well. The sun had shone and there had been a good turnout. As well as his success in his trademark event, Joey had scored money places in four other events. Children had swarmed around him, demanding autographs, asking parents with cameras to take pictures of them being held high in the air by the champion of the day. He was a hero, not least because he was the nearest to handsome that the games circuit had to offer. He stood out in a world where most of his rivals looked like Saturday-night thugs.

  Once the melee had died down, there was a gaggle of adults vying for his attention. As usual, he was focused on what was in front of him, so he didn’t notice the watcher on the fringes, intent eyes never leaving him; assessing, considering, judging. Eventually, Joey extricated himself, and started towards the rather more luxurious camper van he inhabited these days.

  He’d barely taken half a dozen strides when a light touch on his arm made him pause. He turned, the automatic smile on his face. ‘I’ve got a proposition for you,’ an attractive stranger with an American accent said.

  So they’d travelled under cover of darkness, arriving at their destination close on midnight. The moon was a thin sickle in the star-studded sky, barely above the horizon. The camper van bumped down the narrow track, past a two-storey cottage with all the curtains drawn shut and no lights showing. ‘I hope they’re good sleepers,’ Joey said. ‘Otherwise we might have company. I bet they don’t get a lot of late-night traffic on the road to nowhere.’

  ‘We’ll have to take our chances,’ Shirley said. They crested a rise in the road and dropped down into a dip, invisible now apart from the cones of the headlights. ‘See that tree on the right?’ It was a stunted mountain ash, gnarled and twisted by the prevailing winds.

  ‘Is that where you want me to stop?’

  ‘Yeah, right there.’

  They put on head torches and climbed out, collecting a spade, a large battery-operated light and a crowbar from the tool locker on the back of the van. They picked their way across the rough ground with its covering of heather and coarse grasses, taking care to avoid the boggy pools of brackish water. About fifty yards from the road, Joey’s torch beam picked out a small cairn of stones, no higher than the middle of his calf. ‘This is what we’re looking for, right?’

  ‘That’s it.’ No note of excitement, just a calm acknowledgement that they’d found the spot. ‘I put the marker there. I checked out the area with a metal detector, and that’s where I got a hit. I think they’re side by side, judging by the way the detector was beeping.’

  ‘I better make a start, then.’ Joey took off his padded lumberjack shirt and stuck the spade in the soft peaty soil.

  ‘Careful with the top layer, we’ll need to replace that.’

  Joey looked up. ‘Why? We’ll be well on our way before anybody notices a big hole in the ground round here.’

  ‘I don’t want people asking questions. Better to be safe than sorry.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Joey changed the angle of his spade so that he was taking off the top layer of turves and setting them to one side in a neat stack.

  ‘I’ll go and get the ladder.’

  ‘And I’ll keep digging.’

  ‘It’s what I’m paying you for.’ A note of sharpness.

  He gave her a long considering look. But what she’d promised him was worth a bit of hard work. ‘I know. I don’t have to like it, though.’

  Joey had stamina as well as strength but still it took the best part of two hours before his spade hit something that wasn’t heavy wet peat. It was softer than he expected, but it was definitely something alien in the soil. ‘I think this it,’ he called up. ‘That’s about what you expected, right? Four feet down?’

  ‘Exactly. They dug down about six feet and the crates would be a couple of feet deep at least.’

  ‘I’ll cle
ar the top of it so we can pry off the top planks.’ He set to work again, as the light from Shirley’s torch played over the small section of wood he’d uncovered.

  ‘Looks undisturbed.’

  Joey nodded. ‘No sign anybody’s been messing with it.’ He carried on, scraping the dark peat off wood that had been stained almost black by the tannins in the water. Twenty minutes later, he’d revealed a dozen four-inch planks, a shade over six feet long. ‘I thought the wood would be rotten,’ he said, leaning on the spade and breathing heavily, his naked torso gleaming with sweat. ‘Better chuck me the crowbar.’

  A few minutes and a lot of grunting later, two planks had been freed. In the light of the torches, they could both see what looked like a tarpaulin. ‘Definitely something here,’ Joey said.

  ‘The tarpaulin’s reassuring. Looks like we might be in with a fighting chance of salvaging the bikes.’ It was the first time she’d smiled since Oykel Bridge, he thought.

  ‘I hope so. One for me and one for you, like we agreed. Every biker I know will be green.’ Joey returned to his task, piling the planks along the side of the hole. When he’d removed the last one, he carefully climbed down into the crate itself, his feet splashing as he went. There was barely room for him, but he was as eager as his employer to find out what lay inside the tarpaulin. He angled the light on the canvas, searching for a way in. ‘Looks like they’ve sealed it up somehow.’

  ‘All the better. Can you get into it?’ She leaned over, the light gleaming on her blonde hair.