Jasmine complied and replaced the handset in its cradle as it began to ring. Switched to speaker, the tone pulsed loud inside the car for a few rings, before being answered by a female voice.
‘DC Downie,’ he addressed her. ‘You got five minutes?’
‘Only for you,’ she replied warmly.
‘Can you run a name through STORM for me, and give us a call back?’
‘No bother. Just grabbing a pen here. What’s the name?’
Her eyes on the road, it took Jasmine a moment to realise that the growing pause was awaiting her to fill it.
‘Oh. Tessa Garrion,’ she said.
‘Tessa—’ Rab began to relay.
‘Garrion. I’m on it. Call you right back.’
Rab hung up.
‘Thanks,’ Jasmine said. ‘What’s STORM?’
‘Systems for Tasking and Operational Resource Management. It’s a police database.’
‘So we’ll find her if she’s ever been in bother?’
‘No. We’ll find her if she’s had any dealings with the polis whatsoever. If she ever phoned the emergency services, or even handed in a dropped purse at the local nick, they’ll have her number and address at the time.’
Jasmine’s eyes widened. This might be easy money after all. She could have a result by the time they reached Kingussie.
Rab’s phone rang again shortly.
‘That’s a big zero, I’m afraid,’ DC Downie reported.
‘Nothing?’ Rab asked.
‘Absolutely nothing. Not so much as a call to complain about a car alarm going off.’
‘Ach well, worth a try. Thanks, Annabel.’
‘Any time, Dad.’
Rab gave Jasmine a warm wee smile, both proud and conspiratorial. It was an invitation for her to share a moment recognising the special bond between father and daughter. Rab having just tried to do her a favour, Jasmine considered it polite to fake it.
‘How accurate is STORM?’ she asked. ‘I mean, how far back?’
‘Last twenty years, everything is logged and backed up. If you gave a witness statement, gave your details to an officer after a wee car prang, it’s there. Before that, it’s a bit more sketchy, variable from force to force depending on what records they kept and what they got around to computerising.’
‘Twenty years, though. How many people go that long without paying any tax and having any recorded contact with the police?’
‘Well, it matches two kinds of profile,’ Rab suggested. ‘One being the extremely rich.’
‘And what’s the other?’
‘The extremely dead.’
Upon reflection, the possibilities weren’t quite as stark as Rab had painted them.
Jasmine considered that Tessa Garrion could have got married a few years down the line and felt sufficiently estranged from her sister by that time as to feel no need to inform her. If she took her husband’s surname she wouldn’t appear on the STORM system under her maiden name. In fact, she could have got married in July 1981 and not bothered telling anyone, because the two sisters might not have been on quite such neutral terms as Alice Petrie was making out.
She might also have gone overseas, though Jasmine wasn’t sure whether that would have been noted on her tax records. If she was domiciled elsewhere she wouldn’t be eligible to pay tax, but if she hadn’t been earning anything anyway, maybe that aspect of her status wouldn’t be updated.
The one thing Jasmine was still intrigued by, however, was the seemingly abrupt end to Tessa’s theatrical career. Did she get dropped? Depressingly plausible, but surely she wouldn’t give up just like that. Working in a shoe shop was also a plausible stop-gap, something she’d do to pay the bills while she was waiting for a part to come up elsewhere. The name Glass Shoe Company rang a bell, but Jasmine couldn’t place why. As far as she could think, there was no such shop in Glasgow, but it sounded familiar nonetheless. It had slightly uncomfortable subconscious associations too: something out of reach, unattainable, perhaps prohibitively expensive. She was talking the eighties, so maybe it was a now-defunct chain that had been around when she was a little girl or even before: somewhere her mum talked about but couldn’t afford.
First thing the next morning, Jasmine got busy chasing up her inquiries, finding that the two-day gap had been long enough to yield results, though she could hardly call them fruitful. She was informed that Tessa Garrion had not received any kind of welfare payments in thirty years: no unemployment claims, no child benefit, no disability allowance, nothing.
A further call to Polly established that neither Tessa nor any husband had claimed or transferred a married person’s allowance, and there was nothing in her records to indicate that she had left the country either.
The investigation was starting to take on a familiar feel. Tessa wouldn’t be the first subject who turned out to have died whole decades before the client tried to re-establish contact, but she would certainly be the youngest, a tragedy Jasmine was feeling more acutely given the ways Tessa’s life had echoed both her own and, to a greater extent, her mother’s.
Jasmine felt a sense of duty-bound resignation as she reluctantly called Archie Cairnduff, her contact at New Register House in Edinburgh. This would put a lid on the whole thing, after which it would be a matter of finding out the location of the cemetery and as much information as could be gleaned about what Tessa had done with her brief life in the few years since her mother’s funeral.
As she dialled the General Register Office, Jasmine realised she was assuming Mrs Petrie hadn’t done so herself. She certainly didn’t mention it, only remarking her presumption that someone would have got in touch if Tessa had died. It was weird how many clients neglected to do this. Several of Jasmine’s investigations had been resolved through a simple inquiry to the GRO, Archie calling back in a day or so with the missing subject’s date and place of death. At first Jasmine wondered whether the clients simply didn’t realise this was a line of inquiry freely open to themselves, but when she pointed it out they always preferred that she do it ‘as part of her investigations’, even though it would cost them money.
It took her a while to understand what they were really paying her for. They didn’t go to the Registrar themselves because they didn’t want to hear their fears confirmed, a fait accompli mouldering in a file for years, even decades. It was important to them to make some kind of effort – not to mention a small financial sacrifice – while the possibility still existed, a gesture of penitence and regret, perhaps, before ultimately making peace with their loss.
Upon the advice of Harry Deacon, the first couple of times she got in touch with the GRO she had gone to West Register Street in person. Harry said it was important that she strike up a rapport with somebody there, so that they could put a face to her name when she called up in future. ‘It’ll help you skip the queue now and again,’ he said.
On her first visit she had utterly failed to strike up anything beyond the most functionary conversation with some bleakly humourless female apparatchik who looked like she hated her job. More happily, upon her return she got talking to Archie, who had worked for the GRO forever, had a thousand stories to tell and was delighted to have someone who wanted to hear them.
That morning he began by expounding upon the office’s address, telling her how West Register Street was the phrase neurologists got patients to repeat in order to check for symptoms of stroke
Jasmine was happy for him to procrastinate. She always felt a little sad when it was confirmed that a subject was deceased, but this was one she had really come to hope was alive. Eventually, though, they had to get down to business. Archie confirmed that the date and place of birth checked out, so that they could be sure there was indeed only one Tessa Garrion. There was, as anticipated, no record of her ever marrying or having any children.
‘She hasn’t troubled the scorers, as the cricket commentators like to say.’
‘Hasn’t? You mean she’s still alive?’
‘We
ll if she isn’t, then the Register’s Office knows nothing about it. Have you any evidence indicating otherwise?’
‘No. Just a complete absence of evidence of this woman having existed after summer 1981.’
Fell Purpose
It was when he spoke to the girl, Jasmine, that he realised with a hollow dread what would have to be done.
She wasn’t much to look at: freckle-faced, slight; one might even say scrawny, wearing a suit that didn’t make her look businesslike so much as resembling a school-leaver dressed up for her first job interview. She was softly spoken, far from strident in her manner; the girl’s body language under-confident, almost apologetic.
Yet he knew she had already uncovered the secrets of the Ramsay family’s disappearance. This was a worrying enough precedent, but far worse was the passion he recognised in her. She had trained as an actress. Her dead mother had been an actress. Now she was looking for an actress who had gone missing at around the same age as she was now; probably the same age her mother had been when she gave it up to raise the girl.
He could see it in her eyes: this was not a pay-packet to her, it was a quest. A crusade.
Everyone he loved, everything he was, everything he’d done, it would all be taken away. Everything he was working towards and everything he had ever achieved: all of his work would be erased from history. He would be remembered only as the monster who had killed that girl, one more squalid murderer rotting in jail.
The truth would destroy not only him. He could barely bring himself to imagine the pain and the shame that would rain down upon those he loved, those who relied upon him. What had any of them ever done to deserve this? Everything he had ever stood for would be burnt to ashes, all his family’s reputations tarnished by the flames. Each of their lives would be ruined.
There was no other path now, he knew. It was his duty as a husband, as a father.
She would have to die.
Circus Games
Catherine could seldom remember seeing so many police in one place without any civilians in the picture. Given the auspiciousness of her surroundings, it looked like a convention, one that would have riots on the streets if the tax-payers found out the polis were having a mass jolly at Cragruthes Castle. The lawns, the paths, the avenues and the woods were swarming with officers. She could imagine the groundskeeper and the head gardener considering a suicide pact at the prospect of the damage.
It was about as far removed from the standard crime scene as she had ever encountered. Some castles just looked like very grand houses, a turret, a flag and an ancient family name all that distinguished them from other large country properties near by. The larger ones, such as Stirling and Edinburgh, comprised groups of grey buildings atop hills and volcanoes, fortified compounds rather than remarkable individual structures. This place, however, was the full fairy tale, precisely what every little girl and boy thought a castle ought to look like.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it,’ observed Beano Thomson, one of her young DCs. Beano had a fairly dry sense of humour, but could also be boyishly enthusiastic and almost annoyingly positive. Consequently, it wasn’t easy to be sure when he was joking.
‘Yes,’ Catherine replied. ‘If I’m ever going to get shot dead, I want it to be in a place just like this.’
Beano and DI Laura Geddes reported to Catherine as soon as she had stepped out of DC Zoe Vernon’s car. They had been among the first of the Glasgow contingent to arrive, getting there at around two in the morning.
‘What’s the script?’ Catherine asked them.
Laura had already given her the breakdown over the phone while Zoe drove them north, but she liked a recap whenever she was on site, and not just to keep abreast of updates. The memory could play strange tricks, and the way Catherine visualised things when she was first told them could linger confusingly in the mind if she didn’t hear the same points made when she was actually looking at the scene.
‘Incident happened at around nine-fifty last night,’ Laura said, her soft Edinburgh accent rising towards the end of each sentence, as though framing it as a question. ‘The laird and thirty-five corporate guests were watching an outdoor performance of, ironically enough, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by a local amateur dramatics company.’
‘What’s ironic about it?’ asked Beano.
‘It was the twenty-first of June, bawheid,’ Zoe told him. ‘And it was nobody’s idea of a dream evening.’
‘The play was staged at several different settings around the castle grounds,’ Laura went on, ‘and the audience taken around on a seated gantry mounted on a trailer. Catering staff were following on foot, serving champagne between each scene change. At the end of the performance the victim and the laird came down from the audience and joined the cast to pose for a group photo. That was when it happened. Ambulance got here ten thirty-two, and the victim was pronounced dead ten thirty-five, but there wasn’t exactly any doubt about his condition. His brains were on the lawn.’
‘Ouch. Corporate, you said?’
‘Yes,’ Laura replied. ‘A delegation of senior bods from the Royal Scottish Bank, plus their very select guests. Seems it was a very high-class corpie, with the RSB paying the laird five hundred quid a skull. Wee bit more upscale than lunch and a soft seat at the football, so we’re not talking about a group of small businessmen,’ she added pointedly.
Christ, Catherine thought. A wankerfest. This just got better and better. ‘Where are they now?’
‘They’re all in the castle. The theatre company people as well, plus the catering staff.’
‘Have you got everybody’s details?’
Laura held up a list.
‘There are six detectives in there, questioning them all in turn. The lateness of the hour and the booze meant they’d no option but to stay the night as planned. There was one or two of the corporate guests talking about calling drivers up from Edinburgh and Glasgow, but I put the kibosh on that. I asked them all to remain here to assist in our inquiries, but now that the shock is starting to recede, the goodwill and sense of civic duty are wearing off too. They all want to go home and back to their terribly important jobs, and I get the distinct impression that lawyers are going to start being called any minute.’
‘If they haven’t been already,’ Catherine suggested. ‘Okay, make sure we’ve got everybody’s details and then let them go. We’re not going to get much out of them just now anyway. Now, the victim, was he a guest of the bank too?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m sure somebody said he was the special guest of the laird, but I haven’t spoken to him. Not sure anybody has, in any depth. He was being handled by one of the local officers, a familiar face for a bit of reassurance. He was practically catatonic with shock. One minute you’re standing there with a photographer going “Say ‘cheese!’”, and the next …’
‘Your guest suffers a permanent loss of face,’ said Catherine. ‘What about the photo? Do we have it? Who took it?’
‘We’ve got the camera. It was one of the castle staff, an amateur enthusiast taking the snap, but it was for the laird. He always poses with the cast, apparently, and keeps a framed pic as a souvenir.’
‘Well, let’s make sure it’s the only souvenir. Thirty-five guests means thirty-five phones, means thirty-five other cameras. Find out who else snapped anything. Get hold of those phones and sequester every image that was taken over the past twenty-four hours; I don’t care if that includes pictures of their dicks that they’ve been texting to their bit on the side.’
‘We’re already doing that,’ Laura assured her.
‘Some of them had their cameras set to automatically upload photos to online albums,’ warned Beano.
‘In that case, before you let them leave, make sure all of them know that if a “tragic last moments” photo – or something worse – finds its way on to the pages of any newspaper or website, then whoever leaked it will very soon be left wishing his father had just cracked one off.’
‘You got it, bo
ss,’ said Laura.
Her debrief complete, Laura went back inside the castle to relay Catherine’s order, while Beano accompanied her around the grounds to the locus on the far side of the building.
Because of the distance she had travelled and the unsettlingly picturesque surroundings, it felt weird to see so many familiar faces wandering around out of their normal context. She knew it was Strathclyde’s jurisdiction, and she had made various calls last night to ensure she had her own people on the ground this morning, but some subconscious part of her must have expected to feel like an interloper parachuted in to commandeer a whole load of strangers, not to mention anticipating all the grief that went with that. Instead it was like a school trip, and she was teacher.
There had been a time when Catherine would find herself standing among a mass of detectives and feel grateful that she wasn’t the ringmaster of such a circus. The more bodies you had at your disposal, the more the politics and the pressure to get results must be hellish, she thought. Now that she was the one in charge, she looked at the manpower milling about the place and just felt grateful that she could deploy such resources without any questions being asked. In fact, the only questions would have come had she chosen to deploy less. As anticipated, the political machinations had already begun; not so much a matter of certain people wanting results so much as making sure nobody would be able to say the authorities hadn’t done everything they could.
The question was, was it the victim or the venue that was loosening the purse strings? Probably a bit of each. Both the host and the headshot were of aristocratic background, as well-connected as they were well-heeled, and the tragic loss of the latter had to be multiplied by the embarrassment to the former when it came to calculating the score on the official priority index.
It really didn’t do to have people shot dead in the grounds of fairy-tale castles. Not with the tourist season just heating up; to say nothing of the ramifications of such a tragedy striking somebody more commonly to be found on broadsheet arts pages than tabloid front pages. In this instance the term ‘victim profile’ had altogether different connotations. He knew everybody and everybody knew him. The news feeds were already buzzing with tributes not just from all corners of the arts world but charities too, calling him a miracle-worker, fêting his tireless endeavour, his generosity and his vision.
When the Devil Drives Page 9
