The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  Val had heard that more than once.

  And the question: ‘Had she gone rogue?’

  Apart from Costello’s ‘close friendship’ with Archie, their only connection was Malcolm. That boy had reached out to Costello, her mobile number had been on the mobile phone that had been found on his bedside table, tucked down the back of a photograph of his parents was her card with her number on it. He had called her, but Archie had said that the call was so short it looked like he had simply called then rung off, the call was not long enough for any conversation to have taken place.

  And that hurt. Why did the boy not phone his Auntie Valerie? Because he knew, even at his young age, that she would be pissed?

  Valerie tried to put that picture together in her mind. She had been in court more times than she cared to recall in situations like this, especially when she was working with vulnerable children. Was Malcolm vulnerable? She didn’t think so. Abigail was a good mother. She could have said anything to her, but how much had her sister changed? Kids very quickly learn to trust, so had Malcolm moved on from Valerie and Abigail and realized he could only trust somebody from outside the family? Maybe that was the point? He needed to talk to somebody who wouldn’t let it get back to … George? To Abigail? Who had the boy been frightened of?

  Her heart sank, more tears.

  She had no money, no job, no carer, no family, everything had gone.

  Taken from her

  But this Costello had it all. A career, a flat, independence and she seemed as though she had an opinion. She had made her opinion about George quite clear. Was she right?

  Had she decided to go after him? Find evidence to bring him down? Was that what was going on in her mind?

  Valerie looked around the room, Pippa’s style. She could either stay here or she could see what she could do. She knew George. She knew Abigail.

  She got out of her bed and, moving quicker than she had for weeks, crossed the room to her handbag, opened her purse and had a good look through her credit cards. They had all been cleared when she sold the flat and there was credit, a lot of it, enough to get up and get out there.

  Where would George go? She had been his sister-in-law for thirteen years, she knew him in a way that nobody else did. If Costello could do it, then why couldn’t she? She needed to find the truth, whether that meant clearing George’s name or not.

  Something that Abigail had said that night, that last time she saw her sister at the theatre, had been playing on her mind. Abigail had moved the conversation on so quickly – she must have been wrong, it was something like George wouldn’t let me or George wouldn’t like it.

  But he had allowed her out to go to the theatre that night.

  The last time she had seen her sister alive.

  Malcolm in bed early as he had a cold. There had been tension in the house that night, nothing spoken but she had been aware of it. She had been wrapped up in her own misery.

  Bloody hell, they had sat in that lounge, her thinking about the child that she was about to buy and her sister sitting two feet away, keeping a big secret of her own. Had she grown scared of her own husband? Abigail had mentioned that she suspected George was seeing another woman. He was working away on a new contract, he was going home to Port MacDuff more often, being away from Malcolm more often. Never inviting them to go with him. That had been months ago. She hadn’t thought much about it. Abigail was bored and at home too much, she was making up all kinds of stuff about George. He was never home, he was always going back up north to his hometown where Abigail didn’t want to go, or was never allowed to go. How odd that Malcolm had never gone north with his dad. He had never been asked.

  She had years of expertise as a fiscal; she had investigation skills.

  She had nothing, absolutely nothing left to do except drink and she needed something better than that.

  But where to start? She lay down on the bed again, her hand wandering to the bedside table where she had secreted the quarter bottle behind her Agatha Christie biography. Just as Malcolm had kept Costello’s card, so Valerie kept her vodka. She twisted off the cap; she adored that click of the seal breaking, like the first meeting with a new friend. Then she heard her mobile ring. She could either have a drink, then go into a long and troubled sleep. Or she could look at her phone and see who was calling.

  It was a sign. She liked signs. She was beginning to trust them more than her own judgement. Her thumb was trembling as she tapped in her security number.

  It was George leaving a voicemail. He wanted to meet her for lunch. Or coffee, for a chat.

  Every fibre of her being wanted to refuse.

  So she texted back and agreed. A quick coffee at the French Café. The coffee was a legitimate source of caffeine, and it might keep her mind off the vodka.

  Valerie knew, felt, she herself had nothing to do with the murders. She knew that anything the police were doing was routine. Valerie couldn’t explain where she had been that night, she had no memory she could recall. There was no evidence she had travelled to the house, she was not seen on any CCTV. So why had she felt so relieved when they had told her that?

  She had no reason to kill her sister, even drunk, she was never violent. And there had been no animosity between them. Not really.

  But Abigail had opened the door to her killer, the sister who always had the bolt on the door, opening it a crack when the doorbell rang. It was a house isolated in the middle of the city, set back from the road, small windows which were always curtained and barely opened, and the huge monkey puzzle tree that grew at the side of the driveway, shielding the garage and the upper floors of the house.

  Everybody looked at Valerie, as if they knew what she was thinking when she had no idea at all. She had no idea what had happened to her sister and the only person that Abigail would have opened the door to was her.

  But George had a key, it was his house.

  SIX

  The rain was starting to ease off, the cloud was lifting giving tantalizing glimpses of the Ben at the head of the loch. By the time the search team arrived, it was almost dry. They were going to walk a couple of metres apart in a band from the north part of the car park, the line of searchers would be following the contour line of the hill. This part of the loch side rose alarmingly, on the water’s edge it wasn’t very high, a couple of metres. The issue was the rock wall that descended into the water and kept going. The water was very, very deep, yet twenty or so metres south, there was a bay where little friendly waves lapped the shingle, a favourite site for wild camping.

  The search team was going to walk, pulling the winter vegetation apart with sticks, looking for anything that might have some evidential value. First of all, the crime scene investigator and his team were going to gather as many blood samples as they could get. There had been pooling and spatter, not easy to see in the grass and the stony ground at the top of the rise, but as the first SOCO pulled up a blade of grass with gloved fingers, she smiled, holding out a small torch. ‘There you go, seek and ye shall find. But don’t let your big-footed search team stamp all over this. Give us an hour, then it’s all yours. We can get it all done and over before it starts pouring again.’

  Wyngate closed his own mobile, hoping his poker face was convincing. He had looked at the broken phone, sitting in its plastic evidence bag, shattered. Whoever did this knew the old adage that the way to make something untraceable was to drive a truck over it. He would pass it onto the tech team and see what they could do. But he bet Donnie McCaffrey had recently taken possession of a new Samsung 6 phone.

  So Wyngate had asked, ‘The owner of the car is missing, and he’s a cop from Govan. Do you have a body anywhere?’

  ‘No,’ said Mulholland, ‘not yet, and I hope we don’t. Looks like it’s going to be a long day. Hope to God this bloke’s not got himself into some drug deal that’s gone tits up. Hope to God I am not the one to tell his wife. She’ll get no pension if he was on the take. Nothing.’

  ‘Worse than that
, we’ll need to call in Complaints.’

  ‘I’ve already heard from Mathieson. Her orders are that when we find what we find, we are to keep it quiet. So let the team know that there is no going home and chatting about it in the pub, otherwise they will be up in front of a disciplinary.’ Mulholland thought he delivered this with an adequate sense of poise and authority, he was yielding a very big stick. He now felt like Mathieson’s official contact.

  A dead cop was something to be kept out of the press, but a dead cop on Loch Lomond was to be kept away from the tourist board.

  But Wyngate shrugged as if he had been threatened with a trip to ASDA. ‘How long do you think we will have to be here?’

  ‘As long as it takes,’ said Mulholland sounding as though he really was in charge now and he had his hands on the budget.

  ‘Well, it’s my daughter’s birthday party at the soft play this afternoon, and I’ve been here since before dawn.’

  As if on cue, there was a shout from a SOCO, who had been approaching them down the steep part of the path. He was holding something in his hand, strips of paper already in trace evidence sample bags. ‘I can tell you straight away that there’s a smattering of white powder here, pure cocaine on a presumptive test and a lot of alcohol. Somebody was having a party.’

  Mulholland’s twisted heart gave a little leap, Mathieson was going to have a field day with this. He could see himself being passed up the chain to the drugs squad. He looked to the sky and smiled. Sometimes there was a God.

  Two hours later Valerie walked into the massive atrium of the Queen Elizabeth. She was still shaking slightly. The sight of George, well dressed and friendly, the way he had given her a hug and she had caught a wave of his aftershave, the side of his cheek had rubbed the skin of her face, too close, yet it felt very familiar. Too familiar. She had never enjoyed public displays of affection, but he was holding onto her as if she was all he had left in the world.

  Which apart from his dad, she was.

  And all the time, the recognition at the back of her mind, why was that scent of him so reminiscent of …? She had no idea.

  The conversation was about the house and did she want anything. Any of her mother’s stuff? The clock? And had she heard from the police, what were they saying?

  Her brain had stopped working. She needed a drink in order to cope with any of that, so she had finished her coffee quickly and got a taxi from Byres Road to the Queen Elizabeth, stopping at an off licence on the way. She thought she was being discreet, slugging from the bottle in the back of the cab, but the look the driver gave her suggested he had seen her.

  But the vodka had fortified her. Valerie was calm and in control, sucking a Polo mint as she walked into the hospital, looking for a nurse called Hannah. She had told Hannah that she would be wearing a three-quarter-length green coat and a scarf round her neck, clothes she had borrowed from Pippa’s wardrobe. Similarly, a pair of Pippa’s old specs perched up on her head had aged her twenty years. She hadn’t told Archie. His wife’s clothes were far too nunty for her, a little too big but they made her look less official, less threatening and more caring. In short, they made her look very unlike herself. She was wearing her own universal black boots, boots made for the weather. They said nothing about her as a failure. She expected the nurse to be nervous, she could get into a lot of trouble for what she had done. She had shown initiative and common sense but that kind of thing was never going to be tolerated in the NHS.

  Valerie liked the nurse’s thought processes about the identity of the mystery woman they had, especially the fact that the woman had been subject to some kind of violence, and Hannah wasn’t going to put the victim back into a situation of jeopardy, so she had gone the circuitous route. That was the kind of thinking Valerie liked. If the woman they had was the woman who had been on the front of the Daily Record, then the authorities would know her circumstances. So when Hannah saw the photograph on the front page during the Kissel case, Costello looking sixty, O’Hare looking ninety, she had phoned the mortuary and got through to Jack O’Hare’s office, and eventually to the pathologist himself, and he had called Archie at the house getting Valerie, and passing on the number. Valerie had put the phone down and thought this was a sign, if she could get to Costello before anybody else. If it was Costello and that was a big if. So she kept quiet about the message until she had spoken to her. Valerie was justifying it to herself; she was a familial link, her godfather was Costello’s part-time boyfriend, or so the gossipmongers would have it. And Valerie would know Costello the minute she set eyes on her; she had looked her up the first time she had heard the rumour about her and Archie. And Valerie was sure Costello would recognize her straight away, depending on how bad the clonk on the head had been.

  Valerie stood and looked around the vast white space, her eyes searching for a woman who looked nervous, but one who knew her way around this maze of a hospital. She felt conflicted, she wanted Costello to have resigned because she wanted her to be free to investigate the Monkey House Murders. Not lying in hospital, no use to anybody. Unless …

  ‘Theresa?’

  Valerie turned. ‘Hannah?’

  They shook hands. She was younger than Valerie had expected and well, more common, a toughness about the hard set of her face, the stink of cigarette smoke that surrounded her like a halo, the long cardigan that had seen better days and was probably an infection risk. After she shook her hand, Valerie covertly wiped her own hand down the outside of Pippa’s coat.

  ‘Thank you for coming out,’ she said, her accent very broad, harsh to Valerie’s ears. ‘I didn’t really know what to do, and I’d feel stupid if I was wrong. But nobody has reported her missing, we’ve had two false alarms already.’

  ‘So whoever hit her doesn’t want her back.’ Valerie nodded affirmatively, encouraging this chain of thought. ‘You are doing the right thing. I’ve worked in the domestic abuse unit in Edinburgh for the last five years and what we need to avoid is this woman being returned to that environment when she is so vulnerable.’

  They walked towards the lift, keeping their voices low. ‘The police have nobody reported as missing that fits her description at the moment, but when I saw her, I thought I recognized her, just something about her that was familiar and some of the injuries she came in with, well they didn’t make sense. She’s not been living on the street, no way. I’ve seen enough of that in my time.’

  ‘Me too, but what made you think it is my colleague? There must have been something.’

  ‘Well, she has suffered a psychotic break so she couldn’t tell us anything about herself but it was when I read that headline that I made the link. Well, I had been following the Kissel case, the girl who—’

  ‘Killed her child? Yes. I think the whole country was following that.’

  ‘And earlier today, I was lighting the fire with some old newspapers and on the front page was a picture of a police officer and a pathologist.’

  ‘So you phoned Jack?’ encouraged Valerie, knowing that the familiarity of O’Hare’s name would encourage confidence. They were standing in the queue for the lift now, keeping well back, away from any prying ears.

  ‘So I called his office, they are here in the same building but he is away, otherwise I could have gone downstairs and got him myself, but called him and, he must have called you …’

  ‘Will he live?’ Patrick was curt and precise.

  The nurse bustled around the head of the bed, winding a flex round her hand before forcing it back in the machine, pulling over a flap and turning a lock.

  ‘Will he live?’ asked Morna, repeating the question for the benefit of the nurse.

  ‘That’s not a conversation we tend to have in front of the patient.’

  ‘Will he live?’ repeated DCI Patrick at the other end of Morna’s mobile. ‘I’m asking for an opinion, not the Gettysburg Address.’

  ‘My boss wants to know what his chances are.’

  ‘I don’t get paid enough to speculate.�
��

  ‘She said she—’

  ‘Yes, I heard. Cheers.’ And the phone snipped off.

  Morna sat beside the young man. Not so long since she had been in hospital herself, keenly aware of the tubes and tapes. She still had flashbacks to that incident, her right cheekbone still hurt. She looked over at her patient, still intubated, his face swollen and bloody, unrecognizable. His own mum wouldn’t know him.

  Morna looked at his battered face, and she decided he was lovely. He was a young man, he had on very sensible clothes, stuff that his mum or granny would have bought him. They had cut the clothes from him and she had gone through them, wearing thick gloves, there was so much blood. He had been for a scan and X-rays. They had then taken him down to operate on a slow bleed on his brain. The result was, he might make it. He might not, but overall their attitude was a positive one. She had taken his fingerprints and a swab for his DNA; they would process that here. It was very dangerous to do an ID, DCI Patrick had a thing about that. He required proof beyond certainty, probably something to do with his background in the forces, people being blown to bits then having to be identified, she thought. They wouldn’t want to get that wrong. Patrick would be insistent, he would want five markers. Both intelligence and confirmatory.

  She raised the back of his hand to her nose, seeing the fine dark hair, she breathed in, deeply. Although he had been cleansed and disinfected she could still catch the scent of blood, gentle sweat, patchouli oil and something else? Petrol? She thought she had smelled that on his jumper as well. She turned his hand over and looked at the injuries on the flesh of his palms, scraps and scrapes. He had fallen on concrete at some point, recently.

  As she had gone through his clothes, she had noticed there were no designer names on his clothes, all high street brand stuff. Except the Fair Isle jumper, somebody had knitted that for him, with a lot of love. The DCI’s wife had made one for Finn, they took a lot of time and skill. She photographed the jumper on her phone and sent the image off to Patrick. Maybe a family member would recognize the intricate pattern and the different colours that wove and danced between themselves. Fawns and browns and creams with a single strand of deep red, well worn. The wool was balled at the armpits and almost transparent at the elbows. A jumper loved so much, it had been worn to its bare threads. She had run her gloved hand round the neck, then down the inside seams, checking there was no label, and that the stitching also looked hand sewn. This was a unique item somebody would be able to identify, unless of course he was a skint student and the jumper had been twenty pence from a charity shop.