They settled on the Thai restaurant round the corner on Union Street. ‘Mmm, a pre-theatre menu,’ Daisy said. ‘I love a bargain.’ She made a wry face. ‘Must be all those years in Aberdeen.’
‘So it’s true, Aberdonians are tight?’
‘Just as true as what they say about you Fifers. “One generation away from the caves.”’
Karen laughed. ‘Aye, but that’s true.’ She chose what she always had – crab in rice paper wrappers, then pad khing. She loved the crispy ginger that ran through the dish and woke up her taste buds. Daisy was more conservative, going with fish cakes and pad Thai. She was young, Karen thought. Give her time.
They agreed not to talk about the case while they were eating. Instead they talked about holidays. Daisy, it turned out, was in love with the Greek islands. With her friend Tori, she was working her way round the smaller ones, avoiding the tourist trap seafronts lined with tavernas packed with holidaymakers determined to get wasted on beer and ouzo. ‘We love those villages where you rock up to a taverna that’s basically somebody’s patio and you go in the kitchen and choose your fish. And they throw it on the grill for you. Bliss.’
Karen had never been to Greece. She’d heard stories of the plumbing and had decided to give it the body swerve. But what Daisy described sounded like her sort of place. Maybe she’d been too hasty. Maybe it could be a future compromise destination for her and Hamish.
‘Are you heading back to Fife?’ Karen asked as she waited for the bill.
‘Are we done?’
‘For tonight anyway. I can’t see anything much happening until we either get something from James’s computer or the copy of David’s will. And I’d like you to follow up the Artists’ Resale Register angle on Monday too.’ It was the kind of task Jason did well. But Jason wasn’t here and Daisy was.
‘What about you?’
‘First I’m going to have one last attempt to get hold of the Mint.’ Karen tried her phone. Voicemail again. And the iPad’s Find My Phone was giving her the same location.
Now she was seriously worried.
Obviously concerned, Daisy said, ‘Still nothing?’
‘His phone’s been going to voicemail since late morning. I did Find My Phone right before you arrived at the office and it says he’s been at a motorway services in Yorkshire ever since. There’s something wrong. Jason never goes dark. He’s so anxious about getting it wrong, he’s the opposite of going freestyle.’ The waiter arrived with the bill and Karen paid with her card.
‘What’s he doing down there?’
‘It’s another case we’re working. We think a woman called Amanda McAndrew killed her girlfriend then stole her identity.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think it might be to muddy the waters. If you can pull it off, it’s a very good way to obscure the time of death. She knew her lover was estranged from her family, and she’d established that they were going on the road, so nobody was going to report the girlfriend missing. After enough time had gone by, McAndrew could re-emerge as herself, free and unencumbered.’
‘That makes sense, I suppose.’
Karen’s smile was wry. ‘It’s the best I can come up with. We did a bit of fancy footwork and connected her to an address in Stockport. I sent Jason to track her down. I gave him explicit instructions not to make an approach. All he was supposed to do was find where she’s living or working and stake her out till I could join him. And now this. I’ve heard nothing from him since last night. And we think this woman is a killer.’ Karen’s face had taken on a pinched look.
‘Can’t you get the local boys to swing past the services and see whether they can spot him?’
‘They’ve got no skin in the game, it’s not going to be high on their priorities.’ Karen sighed deeply. ‘Why do I always feel responsible for him? I’m not his bloody mother.’ Then she had a thought. She grabbed her phone and searched her contacts for Eilidh. ‘The girlfriend,’ she muttered in response to Daisy’s questioning look.
Eilidh answered on the third ring. ‘Hello, DCI Pirie,’ she said. It didn’t matter how often Karen told the lassie to use her first name, she followed Jason’s example.
‘Hi, Eilidh. Sorry to bother you, but I think there might be a problem with Jason’s phone. I wondered if he’d been in touch with you today?’
‘Yeah, he spoke to me first thing this morning. He was fine, he was going off to some art studio or something. He’ll call me later on, we always speak at bedtime if we’re not together.’ She sounded unworried, which Karen was pleased about. She didn’t want to panic her.
‘OK, no worries. He’s maybe just in a black spot.’
‘Or else he’s out of juice. You know what he’s like, head in the clouds.’
That was one way of putting it. Karen ended the call and stared glumly at her phone. There was nothing else for it. She was going to have to find her wayward wingman.
Sitting on a cold stone step had been bearable earlier in the day. But the sun had gone down hours ago and whatever heating had been on in the hall had turned itself off too. A thin shirt and a pair of suit trousers were no match for the drop in temperature. Jason could barely feel his fingers. He was going to die here, he was convinced of it now. If the lack of water didn’t get him, the cold would.
He kept having spasms of shivering that racked his body with more pain as his broken leg juddered. And then he remembered the pile of velvet curtains in the corner of the basement. The thought of them made him tearful all over again. What was worse? To stay up by the door where there was a chance he could make himself heard whenever people came back to the hall, always supposing he hadn’t frozen to death? Or drag himself through the agony of descending the stairs and wrapping himself in the curtains, too far from the stairs to be heard when he called for help?
It was no choice. He scouted out the descent with his feeble torch and this time he spotted a handrail. If he pulled himself up on the handrail, he could move his good leg down step by step. It would still be agonising but hopefully it would take less time than working his way down on his backside.
By the time he reached the bottom, he was drenched in cold sweat. Worse still, he needed to piss. He was determined not to wet himself. Not because it would be embarrassing when he was found, but because he knew it would only make him ever more cold. Balancing on one leg, gripping the banister with white knuckles, he undid his zip and direct the flow towards the stack of tables. He felt bad about it, but he didn’t have an alternative. Exhausted by the effort, he lowered himself to the floor and lay there for a few minutes until he’d gathered a little strength.
More than ever, he craved the soft warmth of the curtains. He crossed the stone floor in a crippled commando crawl and, with an impressive stream of swearing, dragged himself on to the curtains and wrapped one of them round his suffering body. Whimpering quietly, he managed to find a position that was almost free from pain. If this was going to be his last night on earth, at least he’d be warm.
41
Daisy had refused to take no for an answer. Karen had protested that there was no need, that it wasn’t Daisy’s case, that the whole thing was crazy and that she’d be fine on her own. Though she owned to herself that she wouldn’t mind back-up. And to Karen’s secret relief, Daisy had simply insisted. ‘From everything you’ve said about Jason, I’m sure he’d do the same for me.’
‘Aye, if he thought of it. He sometimes needs a wee nudge but his heart’s in the right place.’
And so they’d gone back to Gayfield Square and commandeered a marked police car. ‘That way we can put the blue lights on and hammer down the road. That should shave a fair bit of time off the journey,’ Karen explained as they set off. ‘Plus if we need to intimidate anybody, we look very bloody official.’
They said little while Karen drove out of the city to join the A1 heading south. Once they were on the dual carriageway she put her foot down and soon they were doing over a hundred miles
an hour, the blue lights washing the carriageway around them. The traffic was light, and Karen rarely had to touch the siren. She was in the zone, focused on handling the car at speed. But the dual carriageway ran out after thirty miles and she had to adjust her speed accordingly.
‘Wow, this is quite a drive,’ Daisy said.
‘There’ll be a lot more flashy-dashy driving to come. Can you read in the car?’
‘Yes, I don’t get car-sick, if that’s what you mean.’
‘OK. Can you check something out online? The fire at the Goldman Gallery in Brighton four years ago? Can you see whether it was arson? What was the word at the time? And how many of David Greig’s paintings went up in smoke? I was planning to follow it up, but bloody Jason got in the way.’ Karen hit the siren to force her way past a couple of cars dawdling on the outskirts of Eyemouth.
Daisy searched the web, her face illumined by the phone screen. Karen drove on regardless, concentrating on covering the miles at the maximum speed she felt was safe. Eventually, Daisy spoke. ‘The police and the fire service both believed the fire had been started deliberately. There’s a quite detailed piece in the local paper. They reckon somebody poured petrol through a delivery slot in the back door and set fire to it. The room where the blaze started was displaying four David Greig portraits plus landscapes, a conceptual piece by Tracey Emin, a series of Damien Hirst Spots paintings and half a dozen works by people I’ve never heard of.’
‘Any arrests?’
‘Nope. Not a one. Lots of speculation about the motive. Was it a spurned artist who was jealous of the ones on display? Was it a protest against contemporary art in general? Was it a firebug who wanted to see a good blaze? Or was it something personal against Simon Goldman? He’d recently closed down a factory in Kent, which didn’t go down well with the workers who’d lost their jobs.’
‘Plenty lines of inquiry there. But I suppose the insurance company coughed up and nobody was hurt, were they?’
‘No loss of life, no injuries reported. So that would have taken the pressure off, right?’
‘Right. The media don’t generally get overexcited about some rich bastard’s pet project getting torched once the first excitement’s over. So if that was Iain Auld standing in the crowd watching his lover’s paintings burn, maybe it was Iain Auld who started the fire?’ Karen sped up as they reached a short stretch of dual carriageway.
‘Why would he do that? I mean, if he was still alive, why would he want to destroy his lover’s art?’
Karen zipped past a clutch of lorries lumbering along in the inside lane. Then she said, ‘What’s the first question we always look at when a case isn’t open and shut?’
‘Who benefits.’
‘And who benefited from this gallery fire?’
‘The gallery owner? He’d just closed a factory. What if he needed the insurance?’
‘He’s a billionaire, Daisy. He’d have plenty of ways to resolve a cashflow problem without burning down his art collection. He could have sold it, if he was that desperate.’
Daisy sighed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t think that through.’
‘The main beneficiary of that fire is whoever has the stash of uncatalogued David Greig portraits. And who’s most likely to have those?’
‘Iain Auld? He’s not dead? Verity Foggo was right?’
‘I’ve asked River Wilde – you know, the forensic anthropologist at Dundee – to compare the photographs with each other and with historic pix of Auld. If she confirms it, then yes, we have to work on that assumption.’
Daisy frowned, pondering the implications. ‘So when David Greig killed himself, Iain Auld had access to a secret supply of his work?’
‘That’s one possibility. But there’s another one that I like a lot better. What if David Greig didn’t commit suicide? What if the uncatalogued paintings are ones that Greig completed after he was supposed to be dead? What if they’re both still alive?’
It was Daisy who broke the silence. ‘How could they have got away with it? Why would you even think of a scam like that?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it, trying to make sense of it. Imagine you’re Iain Auld. You’re a highly respected senior civil servant and a supposedly happily married man. Nobody we’ve spoken to has suggested otherwise. And then you fall catastrophically in love with a man. Not just any man, but a notorious bad boy. He’s got a reputation for promiscuity, drug-taking – excess of all sorts. It’s not going to play well in your professional life. And it’s going to cause immense pain to your wife, who you still care for.’
‘And maybe the last thing David Greig wants is to be publicly linked with somebody who’s the soul of respectability. He’d have been a laughing stock among the YBA crowd, I bet,’ Daisy chipped in.
‘I hadn’t thought of that, but yeah. It’s not exactly avant-garde, is it? So they get together in absolute discretion. I imagine Iain wanting to show off Dover House to his lover – it’s an architectural gem, after all. And David, who is a brilliant copyist and a man who loves taking risks, checks out the paintings on the walls and comes up with the idea of replacing the originals with copies. I can imagine how he’d sell it – it’s subversive, disruptive. And it’s also the emperor’s new clothes – how long will it be before anybody notices what he’s done? And he talks Iain into this.’
‘As a sort of elaborate practical joke, you mean?’
‘Exactly. But David is a properly bad boy. The joke isn’t enough. He knows enough about the world he moves in to know that there are crooked dealers out there who supply private collectors, no questions asked. Now this is me going out on a limb here, but I suspect David had sold those original paintings on. Otherwise, he could have replaced the copies with the originals when the government changed. But they couldn’t do that if he’d already disposed of them. They must have known the moment of discovery wasn’t far off. They didn’t know how watertight they were once the deception was discovered. And besides, they’d reached the point where they were tired of a part-time secret relationship. They wanted to be together.’
Karen was on a roll now as they raced down the M1 forty miles an hour above the speed limit. ‘So the first thing that happens, in the run-up to the election, is that David plants the seeds. He confides in his friends – his lover has dumped him, he can’t work, he’s falling apart, he’s never been so depressed. Then soon after the election, Iain disappears, apparently without trace. I think he sneaked out of the country. I wonder whether David’s dodgy contacts extended to supplying false passports? That would have made it a lot easier. Anyway, however they managed it, Iain goes off to wherever they’re going to start their new life.’
Daisy scoffed. ‘You have such a devious mind.’
‘I’ve learned from some very devious people. Not all of them in the polis.’
‘So once Iain’s safely out of the way, David waits three weeks then fakes his suicide?’
‘Spot on. I’m interested in his choice of location as well. Those Anglesey cliffs are only a few miles from Holyhead. And from Holyhead, it’s easy as pie to jump on a ferry to Dublin.’
‘And that’s where Geary is. Presumably his dodgy dealer?’
‘It all fits, doesn’t it?’ Karen hit the siren to force a daydreaming lane-hogger to swerve into the middle lane. ‘They hook up and set up home somewhere nobody knows them and establish a new life. Paid for by the new work that David makes. Paintings that are genuinely authenticated, given the provenance of a private collector. They pass through Geary’s gallery, which has always handled David’s work, and they get the proceeds.’
‘And then somehow James starts to put the pieces together?’
‘I wonder about the row that the brothers had the night before Iain disappeared. Maybe he told his brother he was having an affair. With a man.’
‘Why would he do that?’ Daisy wondered.
‘They were close. If he was genuinely tired of living a lie, Iain might have thought James was the one person he could trust
with the truth.’
‘But surely he’d have told the police when David Greig hit the headlines as a suicide?’
‘Not if Iain didn’t reveal the identity of his lover. And James seems to have been genuinely fond of Mary Auld. He wouldn’t want to cause her any more grief than she was already going through, would he?’
‘Maybe not.’ Daisy sounded doubtful. ‘But if it got him off the hook?’
‘Who knows? He’ll never be able to tell us now. What we do know is that when he found the photograph of his brother and David Greig, he must have recognised Greig. I imagine he’d have been looking at the papers for some time after his brother’s death, to see if anything turned up. And Greig’s picture was all over the front pages when he supposedly killed himself.’
‘So that answered one question for him. And he started researching the market in Greig’s paintings and discovered new ones were still showing up.’
‘And then Verity Foggo enters, stage left. Confirming what James had maybe started to work out for himself.’
‘I love the way you get all the pieces to fit. So who killed James?’
‘Logically, either David Greig or Iain Auld.’
‘And we don’t know which one?’
‘And there’s one other problem.’ Karen scowled at the road ahead. ‘Like Jason, we don’t know where the fuck they are.’
‘The only sticking point for me is the gallery fire. I don’t know much about artists, but I can’t imagine somebody who was serious about their art agreeing to burning their work.’
‘If their bank balances were running low, they’d have to sacrifice something. The alternative would be taking the chance on their deceptions being uncovered, which would expose them to a whole raft of charges. And Greig knew he could make more art whenever the mood took him.’
Still Life - Karen Pirie Series 06 (2020) Page 27
