‘Sorry about the intentionally false rather than duff line,’ I say. ‘Didn’t mean to sound that pompous.’
He smiles. ‘That’s OK. Just thought you were being a bit of a douchebag.’
‘A fair call… Did you find the sister? Elsa’s sister?’
‘Yes, she’s in Inverness. Going over there to speak to her now. You want to come?’
‘I should get on. Let’s cross-check later, although I’m not sure anything Elsa said is going to be cross-checkable.’
Checks his watch.
‘Conflab at six?’
‘Sure. Meet you back here.’
26
Rosco was married for a couple of years at some point.
A couple of years.
I’ve never been married, but that barely sounds long enough to get to know what your wife likes to have for breakfast, never mind make a decision that you don’t want to live with them any more. Everyone, it seems, just assumed that she didn’t realise that Rosco lived on a diet of pure alcohol, although how could anyone have missed it? She came out of nowhere, she married him, and then she left. Must have been something in it for her. Something more than his exorbitant Detective Inspector’s salary.
Whatever her reasons, whatever went on in that sad little relationship, once she left, Rosco’s drinking became worse, and his life tanked. There was a litany of mistakes, and then finally, when he’d screwed up one case too many, and the inevitable disciplinary proceedings had revealed just how frequently Quinn had covered for him and tried to keep his officer’s head above ground, Rosco was gone, nearly taking Quinn down with him.
I arrived several months after Rosco left, although the investigation into his conduct was still ongoing. I was the guy to trust around the station, because I hadn’t been tarnished by association.
As far as everyone knew, Rosco’s story was as old as modern law enforcement. He worked long hours, he drank too much, he drove his wife away with unusual haste. However much drinking Rosco had been doing before, it upped a notch or two. The station had to watch an officer in free fall. Quinn innately liked him – everybody did – so tried to help him through it, rather than suspending him or making efforts to kick him out.
Then one day, could have been any old day, Rosco went to interview an assault victim, accompanied by a female constable. Constable McDonald. Aly McDonald. Had a good career ahead of her, until that day.
She could see that her Inspector was drunk, but couldn’t force the issue. He was the boss. She tried to talk him out of going to the victim’s house, but failed. So she went with him in the hope that she would be able to mitigate any damage he might do.
To cut a painful episode in police history short, he more or less accused the girl of asking to be assaulted by the manner of her dress and through her actions, and then when her father, who was present, took issue with him, he ended up in a fist fight with him, causing several hundred pounds’ worth of damage in the living room, and ending with Rosco making a drunken arrest.
From there on it didn’t play out well. He was suspended, and the internal investigation raked over everything he’d done in his career. Well, I daresay, no one looks good under that kind of scrutiny. Rosco’s career, certainly, did not survive the intimate inspection.
He was ejected from the police force, and Quinn was left calling in favours to not go down with him. Managed to cling on to his job, but that was it for his career. He was left needing to maintain a good, solid presence in Dingwall, keep his head down and try to hang on to his post as long as possible, because it was more or less certain that he wouldn’t ever be getting offered another one.
Rosco is still around, living in the middle of Dingwall, like some sort of lingering effect of an STD, just to remind the police of their problematic past. He has a job working security at the timberyard over behind Evanton. He’s been stopped for drink-driving, driving without insurance, and driving without a licence. He’s been in a couple of fights. He’s been convicted of causing a public disturbance on three occasions. If there was a three-strikes law, he would have been in prison several years ago, and he wouldn’t be getting out.
Yet plenty of times you see him, trudging through town, obviously sober. Lost a lot of weight, cheeks drawn, coat closed and held tight to his body with his hands in his pockets, regardless of the weather. He says hello, even though I was the guy who eventually got his job. Still calls me ‘newbie’. That doesn’t get old.
There’s something about him, though. Something that separates him from the clichéd figure of the drunk ex-policeman. An air of tragic melancholy, rather than bitter recrimination.
He was cast off into the ocean and allowed to sink. The fact that he didn’t die and is still wandering the streets of the town is a cause of embarrassment to Quinn, but he faces that embarrassment by pretty much never talking about him. A classic case of washing your hands of the problem, and doing your damnedest to pretend that it never existed. However, knowing how much effort he put in to try to save Rosco in the first place, perhaps Quinn is the one who deservedly owns the bitterness now.
I decide to first talk to the former Mrs Rosco. She turns out, like so many of the players, to no longer be anywhere near Dingwall, having moved to Aviemore. I call, I speak briefly to a woman who claims to be the cleaner. She says Debbie Rosco is working and won’t be home until later. Tells me, rather glibly, that she doesn’t know her employer’s work phone number, where she works, or even what she does. I choose not to pursue it, perhaps because it was always going to be an uncomfortable conversation that was liable not to get me anywhere in the first place.
* * *
Don’t even have to get in the car, Rosco has stayed so close to the centre of town. A small apartment, just back from Tulloch Street. The light is grey, heading towards early evening, but the sky is mostly clear.
There’s a slight warmth in the air, even though it’s November, preventing there being any crisp, autumnal feel to the late afternoon.
I get to the door of his block just as he’s emerging. The door closes behind him, he pulls his coat in close, as he always does. Nothing passes across his face as he sees me.
‘Newbie,’ he says, as he starts to walk by.
‘Need to chat, Inspector,’ I say.
He stops, glances back at his house, then looks at me.
‘Something going on in there?’
‘About one of your old cases.’
His eyes drop, he seems to consider whether or not that’s something he wants to do, then he shrugs.
‘I’m on my way out to Evanton. Shift’s starting in half an hour. You can sit with me on the bus, or give me a lift if you like.’
Evanton’s not so far, it’s not like I’m going to find myself in the car in the middle of nowhere.
‘I’ll drive,’ I say. ‘Car’s at the station.’
Not a flicker of discomfort at having to go anywhere near there, or at seeing any of his old colleagues who turned their backs on him. He just doesn’t care.
‘How are you doing?’
He gives me a glance, maybe gauging the level of my concern.
‘All right. Been dry two months, if that’s what you’re asking.’
‘You going to meetings?’
Shakes his head.
‘Weren’t you supposed to be?’
‘At some point. My obligation ran out. So I don’t go. Never did me any good anyhow.’
I try to remember when his obligation would have run out. I was sure from the file that he was still under court orders to attend. I notice that he’s watching me, as if reading the thoughts unfolding in my head.
‘You’ve been reading my file,’ he says.
‘Yes.’
A curious look, but he doesn’t chase it any further. I’m not going to start the conversation about Estonia until we’re in the car, because I’m wary of him not getting in the car at all.
‘I drink, Newbie. Go on benders. Sometimes I do stupid stuff. I’ve got this, I don�
��t know, this inner voice. This other person who lives inside me. Like that, you know, that thing in Lord of The Rings. That’s me. A bit psycho. That other guy, that voice, he tells me not to. He tries, he really does. And I go for these periods. I don’t know, months sometimes. Six, seven months. Then something sets me off, and I know. It’s not even a desperate lunge at a bottle. It’s just something inside that tells me. Something says, now, now you have to go down to the supermarket and load up. You’re going to go home, and you’re going to drink everything you’ve bought. Might be over a weekend, or it might be that I’ll take the days off work that I think I’ll need.’
‘Why don’t you… when you know it’s going to come, why don’t you speak to someone? Go to a meeting then.’
‘I don’t want to.’
We walk on in silence for a while. A couple of people say hello to him.
‘What kind of thing sets it off?’ I ask.
He shrugs. Getting close to the station.
‘Anything. Nothing. There was a girl once. Knew each other in school. Had a thing for a while, but it didn’t work out. If anything it was like a Springsteen song, rather than some romantic love affair that one of those eighteenth-century poets would’ve written about. Anyway, we were young, went our separate ways. But you know, I always had that first love thing about her. The thought of her always made me smile. Inside, at any rate, smile inside. Still, didn’t think about her much, hadn’t even seen her in fifteen years.
‘One day I hear she’s dead. Cancer. Forty-three. Three kids under ten and a husband. How’s that for life kicking you in the face? I went to the funeral. Watched those kids, watched the husband trying to keep it together. I thought, that could have been me. I mean, it probably couldn’t, or at least, not any more than any other guy she went out with in her life. But that didn’t matter. Her death, the awfulness of that afternoon, the sad kid, and the slightly younger confused kid, and the youngest, the youngest of all, just not getting it, running around, enjoying seeing everyone, having fun in her new dress…
‘Got back to Dingwall, had to work that night. So I did. Didn’t miss a minute. I got home the next morning. Sunday. Too early for the supermarkets to be selling booze. I had a cup of tea, a bit of toast. Hands were shaking. I was there, on the dot, when they opened up the booze aisle.
‘I was wasted for five days. The following weekend, back on the night shift, no problem. Didn’t miss a minute. All I had to contend with was the disappointment of that other guy who lives inside my head.’
Sitting in the car on the way out of town. My heart sank as he talked, and now I’m down there again. I’m with him, as I was with Dorothy, in that lonely place. I can feel his misery, and what makes this much worse is the knowledge that asking him about the Estonia story is liable to set him off. Whatever happened over there, I doubt it will transpire to have been a great moment in his career.
Do I want to throw him back into the alcoholic pit just for the sake of a chance at some sort of resolution in this case? He’s liable to not tell me anything anyway, so I’ll be left empty-handed and he’ll be in the gutter. You can’t keep going on benders all your life. Eventually it knocks you down, then it knocks you out. And then you die.
Or should I accept that it will happen anyway, so I might as well make the most of what Rosco can tell me now?
How callous do you want to be today, Detective Inspector?
‘Out with it, Newbie,’ he says after a few moments’ silence. ‘I’m getting out the car in under ten minutes. What d’you need to know? That idiot Harlequin back on the scene, is he?’
I came across the name Harlequin while going through the file – a petty complaint from a petty criminal over a petty business. It barely registered.
I’m going to sound stupid and weak if I don’t just get on with it. We’ve all got our crosses; I need to ask the question, and he needs to deal with it however he sees fit.
‘I have to ask you about the case in Estonia,’ I say.
Clear bit of road, no cars in the immediate vicinity, I take the opportunity to look at his face as I ask. There’s a flinch in the eyes, a betrayal – like he knew all along that was what I was going to ask about – then the blank expression resumes.
‘Can you talk about it?’
‘Always have,’ he says. ‘Doubt I’ll have much more to say than what’s written in the report.’
‘Can you talk about it truthfully?’
The words initially met with silence. I wonder if anyone questioned the veracity of his report back in the day. It wasn’t really our case, after all, we wouldn’t have had the resources to spend much time on it. When an officer returned, did some more work on it, and then more or less said that the case was closed with nowhere else to go, they probably couldn’t take him off it quickly enough. The Estonians would have been happy too. A dead Brit on their patch could be problematic, but if the officer leading the investigation into it wasn’t interested, that was nine-tenths of the battle.
‘You read my report?’ he asks. Like a politician. Even though we know the report is a whitewash, he’ll keep banging on about the report, as it supports his story.
‘I don’t believe it,’ I say. The Evanton 2 sign flashes by before the headlights. Need to get on with it. I could speak to him tomorrow, of course, but I have a feeling that tomorrow will find him flat on his back, or kneeling over the toilet bowl. Depends on how his body takes to occasional bouts of heavy drinking. Everybody’s different.
‘Reading your file, there’s a clear pattern. Despite what the tribunal said, you were a good officer when you started out. Now, I know you can’t look at it and say that you went downhill directly after, and as a result of Estonia, but you had your moments before you went, and didn’t have many after you got back.’
He doesn’t speak, although I give him the space. Not much space, though, as we don’t have the time for it.
‘What happened over there, Inspector? What aren’t you telling me?’
‘There’s nothing,’ he says. ‘The guy disappeared, then he turned up dead. I spoke to, I don’t know, a bunch of people. Spent a couple of weeks out there. Didn’t get anywhere. I mean, big surprise, I usually didn’t get anywhere.’
‘Do you watch the news?’
Nothing. Driving in a car isn’t the best place to interview someone, especially when you want to look in their eyes to get some idea of what they’re thinking, but I know that he wouldn’t be sitting in my company at all if he actually had the choice. I can hardly arrest him for that.
‘There was a woman murdered in Anstruther a couple of days ago. Emily King. The wom–’
A small noise escapes his lips, but when I look round his face is still as expressionless as before.
‘Everybody dies,’ he says.
‘Had you any idea what happened to her?’
Pause.
‘Thought she hung around Dingwall for a while. Then she left. That was it. I wasn’t going to keep tabs on her, was I?’
At least he’s talking for a moment, albeit just talking at the edges. It’s a start, but when he stops, another quick glance shows him staring at the dashboard, his eyes glazing over.
‘John Baden turned up last week.’
He barks out a laugh.
‘Walked into a police station in Tartu. Said who he was. Didn’t seem to have realised that he was already dead.’
‘Where’d he been all these years?’ he asks.
The fact that his first question does not question that Baden was who he said is noted.
‘Held captive in a farmhouse, where his body was harvested and he was used for sex.’
I glance at him, catch his curious look, then he turns away again.
‘If John Baden’s dead, who’s this new guy?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Maybe Baden isn’t dead.’
‘You brought back his body before.’
‘I did.’
‘You stated in the file that he was buried.’
‘He was.’
‘We disinterred the coffin.’
Nothing. I give him a quick look. Face blank, staring straight ahead.
‘There were ashes in the coffin. No one buries ashes in a coffin.’
‘I must have made a mistake,’ he says.
Approaching the Evanton turn-off. I briefly contemplate continuing to drive. Along this stretch of the A9, the roundabout at Nigg excepted, I won’t need to slow down enough to let him jump from the car for over a hundred miles. And I can take the roundabout at Nigg fast enough if I choose. Still, I’m not there yet. I’m not about to kidnap the guy. I’m not about to make him late for his job. For all he says, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not already on a shaky peg.
I slow down, turn off the main road. ‘Half a mile, take a right,’ he says.
‘You need to tell me something I don’t know,’ I say. ‘You need to tell me what wasn’t in the report. You need to tell me why the body was cremated.’
‘Everything was in the report, Newbie. Everything. If there was anything to say, I would have written it down. That’s what we do. We’re police officers.’
‘Then why did your career go down the toilet afterwards?’
‘Same old same old, Newbie,’ he says, and his voice has lost the previous edge.
He was getting agitated, into a state where maybe he was going to blurt something out. Not now, however. The moment is gone. I moved the questioning on from Estonia to his life. He’s happy to talk about his life. He’s an expert on his life.
‘I made a mess of it. Got married, threw it away, wife left me, I made a bigger mess.’
A tired, sad, resignation. A voice that knows that this time tomorrow he’s going to be sitting alone in his house with a bottle.
‘Here.’
I turn off to the right. Into a car park, large storage buildings illuminated in the gathering gloom.
I pull in close to the entrance, and turn the car so it’s not facing where he’s going. As though that might distract him for a moment.
‘Tell me one thing from Estonia twelve years ago that I’m missing.’
He laughs ruefully, a slight shake of the head, head bowed.
Song of the Dead Page 14
