The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  The table fell silent. One by one they looked at the empty chair.

  ‘Diane Mathieson asked me where I thought Costello was. As if I would know,’ said Wyngate.

  ‘None of us know. I think we have all that quite clear,’ said Walker.

  ‘But you have heard from her?’ Anderson wanted confirmation.

  ‘Well, I get an odd text now and then. She asks about Pippa. Nothing else,’ he snapped.

  ‘Bloody hell. I knew she’d fallen out with me but I thought she’d keep in touch even if to tell me what a fair-weather friend I was, if in less polite terms.’

  ‘You thought wrong.’ Walker was still spikey.

  ‘What I meant was,’ Anderson picked his words carefully, ignoring another cheer from the Jenga table, ‘none of us know where she is and she’s not one to go anywhere quietly. This meal was planned for five. She was icily polite when she refused the invite. She asked after Moses, said she was glad he was doing well and that I was to keep the baby away from George Haggerty as that man killed his wife and his child. And I was never to forget that.’

  ‘How many times does she need to be told!’ snapped Walker. ‘She just won’t accept the fact that George Haggerty has a cast iron alibi for that morning. They were murdered between four and six; George had left at one and was on the A9. The fact he looked at Costello “funny” at Mary Jane’s funeral does not make him a murderer.’

  ‘She told me he looked right at her and clapped his hands,’ said Wyngate.

  ‘She told me the same thing,’ agreed Mulholland. ‘And the “Clapping Song” was on the CD, on repeat, when she walked in and found the bodies.’

  ‘That’s the song where they all go to heaven …’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Walker quietly, closing his eyes, summoning some patience. ‘I was there, about four feet behind her. Please, can we let it go?’

  The table fell quiet as another table burst out laughing at some witticism.

  Anderson said, ‘I did ask George about it. He’s round my house quite a lot these days to see Moses, so we do chat. He says he has no idea what Costello’s talking about. He recalls seeing her at the funeral, he might have looked at her. He might have been brushing his hands against each other to keep warm. It was a cold day; he had just come out the crematorium. I was standing right next to him and there was bloody Costello hiding behind a Victorian gravestone like a ferret-faced Goth stalking the dead.’

  The image made them smile.

  ‘George Haggerty might not have been everybody’s idea of a perfect husband but he had cared, in his own way. I have seen his distress at the loss of Mary Jane—’ Anderson took a deep breath – ‘his adopted daughter, and my real daughter. He has been generous to me in that grief while his wife and his son were murdered. He’s devastated; he’s on some serious medication. And—’ Anderson looked at them all one by one – ‘he is Moses’ grandfather, if not by blood. I am, as the DNA has proved. George has been dignified over that as well. That child was taken from him with little more than a glance at a test tube.’ He nodded. ‘When the court made that interim judgement, he said “do whatever is best for the boy”. And he meant it. I don’t think that’s the act of a guilty man.’

  ‘Sounds innocent to me,’ said Wyngate. As the father of two wee kids, he felt he could judge that.

  ‘And I bet Costello said that was exactly how a guilty man would act,’ argued Mulholland.

  ‘How does she think an innocent man should react to the murder of everybody he had loved in his life? Given her past, she should know the answer to that one,’ said Walker. ‘And there is the small issue of a total lack of evidence. As well as an alibi that can’t be broken.’

  ‘You checked?’ asked Anderson, surprised.

  ‘Bloody right I did. You?’

  ‘Of course I did. So did Mitchum. I trust that bastard Haggerty as far as—’

  ‘I thought you just said—’

  ‘I know what I said, but that’s not what I feel. I know exactly what Costello is going on about. Yeah, I asked around about that alibi. He’s watertight. Police Scotland are his alibi. He was caught speeding up the A9. Dad in care home in Port MacDuff, care home phones the house at 1.10 a.m. George leaves after a bit of an argument. He stops on the road and texts the missus, she calls back. That all maps out. The mobile phone is where it should be. And then, thirty minutes later, he gets stopped by the traffic police. But Costello is … Well, George Haggerty is an itch she can’t reach to scratch.’ Anderson opened his palms, grasping for the right phrase. ‘She’s obsessed by him.’ He caught Walker’s eye, a shared thought that neither of them voiced. What the hell was she up to?

  The Jenga tower at the corner table of Old Salty’s got higher, somebody was clapping their hands together in delight.

  Clap Clap.

  ‘Have you and George really bonded over Baby Moses?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Well, Moses has Down’s Syndrome, he’s three months old. His mother sold him, the broker rejected him, his mother was murdered and he was abandoned in a stranger’s car. I think the wee guy needs all the family he can get. He’s great.’ His voice was full of pride.

  It was obvious to the others that while Colin Anderson and George Haggerty had indeed bonded over their loss, their relationship would fracture the friendship of Anderson and Costello. It explained her absence from the table.

  ‘You can understand Costello being bitter. I’m bitter. I’ve known Abigail all my life,’ said Walker. ‘She would have loved Moses, if she had ever been allowed to know she had a grandson.’

  Same way I’d have loved my daughter if I had been allowed to know she existed, thought Anderson, but we don’t make the rules.

  Anderson recalled the crime scene photographs, Abigail’s arms wound tight round her son’s body, just as she would have protected her, his own daughter, Mary Jane. She would have felt the same about her grandson.

  Mulholland waved a sticky finger in the fiscal’s direction. ‘You have known the Haggertys all your life, and you accept that George is innocent.’

  ‘I accept his alibi,’ corrected Walker, carefully.

  ‘And Colin, you share a grandchild with the guy, you know him, and you think he’s innocent. Why the hell does Costello think she knows better?’

  ‘Bloody female intuition,’ said Anderson dryly, ‘seemingly that trumps small things like evidence and cast iron alibis.’

  ‘Well, she’ll have to toe the line when she finally deigns to return to work, when she gets on with cases she’s actually paid to investigate, not go off on a whim of her own. Yeah, a few days back and we’ll sort her out.’ Mulholland gave Wyngate an exaggerated nod, and got one in return.

  Colin Anderson put his hands on the table then took a sip of his pint. Something about his manner, his quietness, cast unease over the rest of the table. ‘She’s resigned.’

  ‘Fuck!’

  ‘She what?’

  Anderson looked at Walker, and gave him a slight shake of the head. ‘Sorry Archie, I didn’t know if you knew. She resigned on Friday the tenth. She wound up Haggerty at Mary Jane’s funeral on the Friday, then spent all weekend asking you, me and the Baby Jesus for help. Then she hangs about Haggerty’s house and he files a complaint for harassment. She gets short shrift and resigns, not wanting to be hampered by the legal restrictions of Police Scotland.’

  ‘Resigned? Really? Resigned and didn’t tell me.’ The fiscal’s face was etched with disbelief, that slowly morphed into hurt.

  ‘She didn’t tell me either,’ said Anderson, ‘I was told “formally”.

  ‘Bitch,’ muttered Walker.

  ‘Stupid bitch,’ added Mulholland.

  ‘Brave though, that takes some balls.’ Wyngate raised his glass, they toasted her.

  ‘To Costello’s balls,’ said Mulholland.

  The mother of the family in the next booth turned to give them a dirty look. The chip tower of Jenga collapsed.

  A tourist bus crawled past, part of a new Ex
plore Scotland initiative; Glasgow at midnight, on a bitter cold November Sunday; the open-topped upper deck was empty apart from the two drunks leaning off the back of the bus singing a song about where to shove your granny. The downstairs of the double decker was steamed up. Anybody in there would see nothing but glazed lights and a dense smirr of rain, which was probably just as well.

  ‘I do worry about Valerie, she wasn’t exactly stable before the murders. Something I have only become aware of in hindsight.’

  ‘She was married though, so there was a somebody once?’

  ‘He left her because of her drink, I know that. Now. She was like a robot walking round the house on Balcarres Avenue, no tears, no emotion. It all seemed too much trouble for her. Talking about a picture that was missing, where was the Lego model she had built at Christmas? Was George going to sell the house?’

  ‘You know murder transforms those it touches. Valerie’s not immune because she’s part of the judicial system, she has lost everybody,’ argued Anderson.

  ‘I don’t even think she sees George now.’ Walker glanced at his watch, ‘I suppose I should go and visit her. She’s staying at the Jury’s.’

  ‘Really? It’s very nearly midnight.’

  ‘Alcoholics don’t sleep, recovering ones sleep even less. And she’s in a hotel because she’s skint. She sold her flat to try to buy a baby, remember.’

  Archie Walker wasn’t ready to sleep and he wanted to clear his head. It was only a twenty-minute walk from Byres Road to the hotel where Valerie had been living for the last three weeks. She’d be awake. Insomnia was one of the reasons she had reached for the bottle. He’d get there and phone her. If she answered, fair enough, if not he’d walk on to his own house which was another ten minutes along Great Western Road.

  It was one of his conditions to get her to stop drinking. He would pop in with no advance warning, and she had better be sober. So far, for him, it was fifty fifty.

  As he watched the steady rain, the glow of the traffic lights, he wondered about her memory lapses, and the nagging doubt at the back of his mind. Valerie was a fiscal, she had been a talented prosecutor in court, fierce when she was at the top of her game. Would she know how to commit a perfect murder?

  Since the incident at the Blue Neptune, Abigail had said Valerie could stay at her house, but Valerie said she had not been there, or if she had, she couldn’t recall it. If she had been there, she was drunk and nobody else left alive could bear witness to what had happened. Valerie had been in the house on the eleventh of October, three days before the murders. Her prints had a right to be there. And the perpetrator had taken their time in the house, they had known the house, known the victims.

  And in Mathieson’s view, a fiscal would be well placed to do that, but whoever had committed that atrocity, had a clear and precise thought process. Not the Valerie that he now knew, the one who crawled around the floor, too pissed to stand up.

  He watched two young women, giggling as they got off the bus, deciding walking would be quicker than waiting on the late-night traffic through Queen Margaret Drive clearing. Their laughter made him think of how Valerie had been his favourite, the quiet thoughtful one. Abigail was the loving wee girl then, a normal happy child, mischievous and playful, a free spirit. She was fun to be around.

  Anderson nudged him. ‘Now we are on our own, tell me, do you think she did it?’

  ‘Nope, she’d have been so pissed she wouldn’t have cleaned up, it was a cool methodical mind committed that crime.’

  ‘OK, does she share Costello’s suspicions of her own brother-in-law?’

  ‘Valerie is the one with no alibi, not George.’

  ‘Answer the question Archie.’

  ‘Yes, she does.’

  ‘Come on, let’s walk up to Oran Mor,’ Anderson suggested; it was too cold to stand still. ‘So what was Abigail like?’

  ‘I was just thinking that. She was happy. A GP, bright. She was happy then Oscar, her first husband, was killed in an accident, boating, I think. Car? No, drowning. She ended up going to court to get him declared dead.’

  ‘That takes ages, seven years?’

  ‘Indeed. Mary Jane was about six or seven at the time he went missing.’

  ‘They seem to be a very unlucky family,’ said Anderson thoughtfully, standing at the kerb, waiting to cross Byres Road. ‘But I do see Costello’s point that no family can be that unlucky, which suggests it was nothing to do with a lack of luck.’

  ‘Maybe that’s not true, maybe in a roundabout kind of way everything is linked.’

  ‘A butterfly flaps its wings in Columbia and the number twenty-seven bus gets diverted through Clydebank? That kind of thing? Come on, let’s cross.’ They both jogged across the road, cutting between the four lanes. ‘It’s not a small world when the fish swim in the same small circles. I still don’t understand why Sally never told me she was pregnant. I’d have stood by her. I’d have wanted to know Mary Jane.’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t know the baby was yours. Or she did and didn’t want you to know. She was with Braithwaite at the time and we know what a psycho he turned out to be. Maybe it was self-preservation.’

  Despite the tragic ending to the situation, Anderson smiled. ‘It was a drunken night in the park when her bloody boyfriend had buggered off elsewhere. So yeah, not proud of it, but we were young and, maybe not in love but in lust at least.’

  ‘Well, there you go then, at least you are human.’ Walker stopped to put a pound in the box of a homeless person. Anderson patted the Staffie cross that was snuggled under the blanket and gave him two of Nesbit’s treats. They walked on. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ proclaimed Walker.

  ‘Be careful,’ cautioned Anderson. ‘You’re a lawyer, it’s against your religion to think without getting paid by the hour.’

  They walked on, up to Oran Mor, watching the remnants of the rain fall as orange and golden tears, catching the glare of the street lamps and the headlights of the traffic waiting at the Queen Margaret Drive junction.

  Walker spoke with a sigh, ‘I really do need to go and see Valerie, I’m feeling guilty. I think she’s hiding from me. She thinks that she has let me down, again. Especially at the house. She could barely be bothered to put a comb through her hair, or wash her face.’ He shook his head, being as perjink and neat as he was, this was a heinous offence. ‘Maybe she became a lawyer for all the wrong reasons. Who can cope with months and months of working on child abuse cases when she was yearning for a child she couldn’t have. I’m her godfather. I’m supposed to look after her spiritual welfare, so I buggered that up good and proper.’

  ‘She buggered it up herself. At one point, Valerie was on a good career ladder if she was already in charge of a unit in Edinburgh. She was doing OK. At one point,’ Anderson repeated.

  ‘She was, at least until … until her marriage broke up, until she realized that she was going to have difficulty having kids. Then she began to drink. It was the pressure of the job, the pressure of going through every test in the book, with a husband that thought it was all too much bother. Grieg, her husband, had more of a que sera sera view on the subject. I’d like to think if I had a fiscal in my office with failed IVF behind her, I’d have the sensitivity to transfer her away from a child abuse unit. I saw her falling apart, I tried to intervene, talk to her boss to get her moved, but they wouldn’t do it unless she asked, and rightly so … well, I thought that was a shit decision. It had to come from her, but she was far too proud to say that she couldn’t cope.’

  ‘She was very well thought of at her job, and she’s still young. She’ll get back to it, once all this calms down. She’ll get back on track, just needs a bit of time, a bit of support to get off the sauce.’

  ‘I don’t think I can be bothered with her nonsense tonight.’ He sighed. ‘Is George really round your house a lot?’

  ‘Too much for my liking,’ answered Anderson truthfully. ‘At times I like him, other times he gives me the creeps. He walks about my house
, he drinks tea with my wife, he cuddles my grandchild; the child of a girl he adopted so I can’t deny him that, can I? Mary Jane was in his life for twenty years. I never met the girl, and then I waltz in and take the only surviving relative George has and claim him as my own. By rights that child belongs to him.’

  ‘You need to think practically, you have a house, a wife, a bank account that can support it all, George Haggerty is bereaved mess, he lives here and in Port MacDuff, two hundred and fifty miles apart. He shuttles back and forth. Not exactly stable. I think you are doing the right thing, I don’t know that I could do it.’

  They stopped at the corner outside Oran Mor, beside the bus stop, a couple of Jack Russell terriers crossed the road, their double lead tied to the handles of a bike with no lights ridden by a Chinese student. She nodded at them in acknowledgement for clearing the path for her. ‘Yet a woman whose judgement we both trust believes this so much she has resigned from her job.’ Anderson smirked. ‘Mitchum said that she told him to take a running fuck?’

  Walker smiled.

  ‘Does she say much in the texts?’

  ‘It’s all very civilized.’ He pulled out his phone. ‘She never told me that she has resigned though. I guess she thought I would talk her out of it.’

  ‘Do you know what she’s up to?’

  ‘Nope, but I presume she’s after Haggerty.’

  ‘Do you think she’s going to do anything stupid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So do I.’

  Wilma Patrick laid down her knitting and fumbled for the remote before that dreadful reality TV show started, the one where the ‘stars’, who had spent their youth at the best public schools in England, couldn’t string a coherent sentence together. Wilma had retired for health reasons having taught primary pupils for over thirty years, nothing wrong with a bit of ABC and 123 before they started all that vertical learning and companion studies nonsense. She had taken her package before she said something she really meant during a meeting. She blamed Alastair of course. Being married to him always gave her a different perspective on life. And the lack of it.