by Claire Askew
8 June, 11.45 a.m.
Birch wasn’t listening to the service: had stopped listening a while ago. She hadn’t heard a word of the First Minister’s over-long address; hadn’t paid attention to the various relatives or members of college staff who got up to speak about each of the victims in turn. She didn’t even tune in to Aidan Hodgekiss – now a person of interest in her investigation, though he didn’t know it. She was thinking about that morning’s phone call with Moira Summers.
It was exactly as she had always thought, right from that first interview at Fettes, right after the shooting: Moira clearly did have something she was holding back, something she wanted to talk about. Would she be willing to reveal it to a senior officer she’d only spoken to a handful of times? Amy had spent so long building up their rapport, whereas Birch was almost a stranger. McLeod was a bloody fool, far too concerned with what the press might think of him. People like Lockley needed to be ignored, not worried about, however hard it may be; she of all people knew that. Now Amy was no longer on the case – and it’s all down to me. And I’m frazzled. I’m struggling. What if I make a bad call? This was the tumbleweed of Birch’s thoughts, blowing about in her brain.
Liz Gill’s twin sister, Valerie, was speaking now, or trying to, between long pauses in which she put her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes, and the congregation made mumbled, encouraging noises. She was talking about her sister’s brave but fatal decision to tackle Ryan Summers in the Three Rivers cafeteria.
‘That was just the way Liz was. If she could see a way to help, then she would just do it.’
Birch’s attention drifted once more.
She sneaked a look around. She’d almost arrived late, as she’d been needed to help coordinate things outside when the vigil attendees arrived in Parliament Square, bringing with them half of the Scottish government, and most – or so it seemed – of the world’s press. As a result, she’d had to squeeze onto the end of a row as the service started. Amy had saved the seat for her. McLeod was a few chairs along, and although he was looking intently at Valerie Gill as she struggled through her speech, his eyes looked glazed. Birch would bet any money that he was trying to figure out how to surreptitiously check his phone.
If she turned her head in the other direction, she could see Jack Egan. He was sitting directly across the aisle from her, flanked by one of her colleagues on one side, and a custody officer on the other. That investigation was ongoing, but Egan had been granted permission to attend the service. He sat with his elbows on his knees, resting his chin on his hands, a wholly inappropriate pose for church, Birch thought. But he didn’t look bored – rather, as though he were deep in thought about something wholly unconnected to Valerie Gill or the memorial or Three Rivers. When he moved, light from the stained-glass windows swam on the lenses of his thick-rimmed hipster specs.
Also across the aisle, and a couple of rows in front of Egan, Birch could see the back of Anjan’s head, and his shirt collar, and the impeccably cut shoulders of his black suit jacket. She’d picked him out in the throng as the attendees began to file into the building, and then realised she’d been trying to. Now she was telling herself not to look at him, and then ignoring the command.
There was a shuffling noise behind her: the quick scrape of a chair-leg against the cathedral’s stone floor. In spite of herself, she looked round. In the press area towards the back, Grant Lockley had stood up and was now apologising his way out of his row.
‘The hell is he going?’ Birch said it through her teeth, but just loudly enough that Amy turned her head and whispered, ‘What’s up?’
‘Lockley’s about to go AWOL,’ she hissed back. ‘I’m just going to go and keep an eye.’ Amy threw her a warning look, but Birch ignored it. Yes, this was personal. She didn’t trust that man an inch, especially not on a day like today.
As swiftly and quietly as she could, Birch stood, thanking her lucky stars that, pre-coffee that morning, she’d chosen flats not heels, and padded up the aisle after Lockley, and out of the cathedral into the sun.
She’d been expecting to emerge into the usual hustle and bustle of the Royal Mile: bagpiping buskers, traffic rumbling across the cobbles. Instead, everything was weirdly quiet. The road was closed, of course, and West Parliament Square had filled with hundreds of people. Most of them stood with faces upturned, watching Valerie Gill as she struggled through a thank you to her brave twin sister, her face projected dozens of feet high onto STV’s huge outdoor screen.
Birch paused at the top of the steps outside the cathedral door. From here, she had a decent vantage point from which to look out over the crowd, and she watched as Lockley began picking his way around the edge of it, glancing around and behind him as he went. Once, he stopped, and raised his mobile phone to snap a photograph that must have taken in most of the crowd’s wide sweep, the big screen a bright backdrop. I’ll be in that photo, Birch realised, though at that distance she’d be too small to be recognised.
‘Guv?’ Amy was at her elbow. ‘You okay?’
Birch didn’t look round: her eye was fixed on Lockley as he shimmied along the ragged line at the very back of the crowd.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, and nodded towards the journalist’s slow-moving figure. ‘I just wanted to see what the hell he’s up to. Why’s he leaving early, when the action’s inside?’
Amy grimaced.
‘He’s been writing all sorts on the internet this morning,’ she said. ‘Live-tweeting, he calls it. I was watching him as we came in, taking photos of people – seconds later they go up on Twitter with some caption or other. He’s all over the hashtag.’
‘Hashtag?’
Amy smiled.
‘Get with it, guv. #TRCMemorial. People at the vigil were even posting selfies. There really is nothing sacred on social media.’
Birch squinted. The sun was strong now, flashing up off the shiny cobbles and glancing off the windows of the High Court and the Signet Library. Lockley had come to a stop, and was talking to a man who looked vaguely familiar.
‘You can have a look, later,’ Amy was saying. ‘Though there are a lot of Lockley fans on there, so it might make you sick. All these people tweeting to thank him for being brave and pursuing the truth, and—’
‘Who’s that he’s talking to?’
Amy blinked, and then, following Birch’s gaze, squinted out over the crowd herself. A small gaggle of men had now gathered around Lockley: they watched as he shook hands with a couple of them.
‘They might be fans,’ Amy said, rolling her eyes. ‘Like I said, there were plenty of people on this hashtag who love Lockley. A couple of them were saying that if they saw him in the crowd, they’d come over and say hello.’
Birch patted herself down: no phone. It must be in the car. She cursed.
‘Can you get on that hashtag now?’ she said. ‘See who’s been in touch with him lately?’
Amy fished out her phone and jabbed at it.
‘It’d be so like him,’ she said, ‘to get up and leave an event like that because someone outside wanted his autograph. Ah, right – okay, here we are. Grant Lockley, tweets and replies.’
Birch watched the men on the other side of the square as she waited for Amy to speak again. In the crowd, people were starting to fidget, to come out of their big-screen stupor just a little. Clearly, they sensed the service was drawing to a close.
‘The last person he tweeted at was – oh, surprise surprise.’
‘What?’
Some of the men were holding – something. Concealing something, it looked like . . .
‘Four minutes ago, he tweeted someone called @SapperGeo to say, “I’ll be out in a minute, stay put”. Guv?’
Birch was already halfway down the steps. Placards. They were hiding placards. There was about to be some sort of unauthorised demonstration, Birch realised, led by a known scumbag named George Gulbraith, online alias SapperGeo. Gulbraith was a member of the SDL, a fascist protest organisation that se
emed to consist of about thirty middle-aged men and a few daft teenage lads. George had other causes, too: in fact, it seemed his hobby was to show up on the vexatious side of just about any rally or picket publicly held in Scotland. Now he had a captive audience of hundreds, not to mention the thousands of others who might be active on Lockley’s hashtag. Following roughly the path that Lockley had taken, Birch began to fight her way towards the gaggle, aware that Amy was struggling along in her wake.
When she was about halfway over to the group, she saw that Gulbraith had organised them into a rough line, and that Lockley was poised a few feet away, phone raised, ready to take their photograph. Typical Lockley: never mind a respectful write-up of the memorial. This was the picture that would grace the top of his column come tomorrow: Fascists air grievances as Three Rivers crowd look on.
Birch came to a clear patch at the fringe of the crowd, and signalled to a uniform whose name she knew, but couldn’t, right then, remember.
‘Come here, sunshine,’ she called over. ‘You’re needed.’
Too late: Gulbraith’s gang had now uncovered their placards and arranged them in a scruffy row, grinning for Lockley’s photo. Or some of them were grinning, at least – others wore scarves across their noses and mouths. People in the crowd near them began to jostle one another, and point.
Birch was only about twenty feet away when Gulbraith lifted his placard high above his head, and barked out the words daubed on it over the heads of the still-quiet crowd.
‘Ryan Summers is an anti-feminist hero!’
The echoes rang off every wall.
‘Shit!’ Birch nudged the uniformed officer. ‘Get some more bodies over here, would you? Like, yesterday.’
The neon-coated officer began speaking rapidly into his radio, though Birch could already see some of her colleagues moving in their direction.
She lunged towards Gulbraith, elbowing Lockley aside.
‘Come on now, George,’ she said, loudly enough that the whole group turned to look at her. ‘This is a bit farcical, isn’t it? Even for you.’
Gulbraith looked at her for a moment, his arms still raised above his head, the placard waving in the air.
‘We’re protesting against discrimination, Sergeant Birch,’ he said, his voice still raised. ‘There are feminist agents preaching a radical agenda of hate in this country. They say Ryan Summers committed murder because he was a white man. They say white men are the cause of all violence. They say they want to eradicate us all. Isn’t that hate speech?’
Birch forced herself not to roll her eyes, but she knew Amy had done so behind her – a couple of the men threw angry looks in her direction.
‘Ryan Summers,’ Gulbraith was saying, ‘was a victim of this feminist agenda. He was trapped. He felt like his only solution was to try to overthrow the feminist state.’
Birch closed her eyes for a moment. Count to ten, Helen. Around them, the crowd was becoming fractious, as more and more people became aware of Gulbraith’s sign. A few had begun to shout back at him.
‘And you know that how, exactly?’ She was stalling for time: out of the corner of her eye she could see a flank of flak-jacketed officers approaching Gulbraith’s gaggle from the back. ‘You been going to see some dodgy medium, or something?’
‘Those women died because they had signed up to the radical feminist agenda,’ Gulbraith shouted. Something hit his still-waving placard with a thwack, and then landed at his feet. A white candle with a white cardboard skirt, thrown from somewhere in the crowd.
‘Keep order, please!’ The neon-coated officer Birch had collared to help was doing his best to keep a gap between the now-angry vigil attendees and Gulbraith, and he began to yell those three words over and over at the crowd. The tang of panic was in the air as people stomped and elbowed around. The back-up was nearly upon them, but Birch needed to do something.
‘All right, George,’ she said. ‘You’re under arrest.’
She reached up and clamped one hand around his forearm. The men around him seemed to rear up like angry dogs, but Birch was unmoved: she guessed that they all had records, and none of them would particularly fancy a stretch for assaulting a police officer.
Gulbraith lowered the placard, but flinched his arm out of Birch’s grip.
‘On what grounds?’
Birch took hold of his arm again, digging her fingertips in this time. McLeod’s face drifted across her mind, and she remembered what he had said about Lockley.
‘I’ll figure it out later,’ she said.
The flak-jackets were upon them. A few began to seize hold of Gulbraith’s companions, while the rest formed a line between the protesters and the crowd.
‘This is a violation of my freedom of speech,’ Gulbraith spluttered. ‘And our freedom of assembly! We have a right to protest!’
Birch spun Gulbraith around easily, though he attempted a struggle.
‘Now George,’ she said, ‘you’re not resisting, I hope?’
His body went limp. Birch snapped her fingers at the neon-coated officer, who took over, latching Gulbraith into handcuffs.
‘I’ll write this up,’ she said to him, in a low voice. Then, to Gulbraith, ‘Oh, George?’
The man squinted over his shoulder.
‘It’s Inspector Birch, these days.’
She turned her back on Gulbraith as he was led away. Amy was grinning, and as Birch approached, she held the flat of her hand up in the air. Birch hesitated for less than a second before reaching up and high-fiving Amy, and both women laughed.
‘Nice work, guv,’ Amy said. ‘McLeod, eat your heart out.’
Birch snorted.
‘More like “McLeod will eat my heart for dinner”,’ Birch said, ‘once he finds out about that little stunt.’
‘Detective Inspector Helen Birch, there.’ It was a man’s voice, and it came so close and so unexpectedly that Birch physically jumped. ‘Arresting a peaceful protester without legitimate grounds.’
Lockley was standing only an arm’s length away, holding up his camera phone. He was filming them. With a sickening jolt, Birch realised he had not only filmed the short-lived protest, and Gulbraith’s arrest, but he had also filmed her high-fiving Amy.
For a moment, the two female officers stood motionless. Birch wanted to yell at Lockley, wanted to smack the phone from his hand – she wanted to ream off every name she’d ever called him privately, to tell him all the ways in which he’d messed with her life, and her dead mother’s life, and yes, her long-missing brother’s life, too. But whatever she said or did next would be captured on film, and uploaded to the internet. Behind her, the memorial attendees had begun to file out of the cathedral. They might be visible too, in the background of Lockley’s shot. Birch stood frozen, with no idea what to do next.
‘Mr Lockley?’
They all looked round: Amy, Birch and Lockley, at Ishbel Hodgekiss. She was standing about a metre away. Lockley immediately turned the camera phone away from Birch, and towards her.
‘No, thank you,’ Ishbel said, passing one hand over her face as though shielding it from the glare of some bright light. ‘I don’t give my permission to be filmed.’
Lockley hesitated, but then lowered the phone.
‘Thank you,’ Ishbel said. She looked over at Birch for a moment. How long has she been standing there? Birch thought.
‘Mr Lockley,’ Ishbel said again. ‘I’ve been thinking some more about what you said. About your offer. Of an article, or . . . something. With me . . . telling my story. I think I’d like to do that, please.’
Lockley’s face broke into a grin. It seemed Birch’s moment of indiscretion was, for the time being, forgotten.
‘Ishbel,’ he said. ‘I’m so pleased you’ve changed your mind. When can we arrange a time to speak?’
Birch threw Amy a look, but Amy only shrugged.
‘Mrs Hodgekiss,’ Birch said. ‘Do you think perhaps you should talk this over with Rehan before you . . . commit to anything?
’
Ishbel’s expression was cold.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Between you and me, DI Birch, I don’t have a huge amount of time for Rehan. I don’t think he’s given me very good counsel, these past few weeks.’
Birch thought about Reh, her spy in the Hodgekiss house, and all the ways it must have seemed to Ishbel like he was cosying up to the husband who’d betrayed her. She could think of no response, but Lockley was quick to fill the silence.
‘The sooner the better, really,’ he said. He was fully facing Ishbel now, having turned his back on Birch and Amy. ‘I know this must have been a difficult morning for you, but if you had time just now, we could—’
‘No,’ Ishbel said. ‘I don’t have time now. I need to . . . talk to someone else, first.’
Your husband, no doubt, Birch thought. And I’d want to do more than talk to him, if he was mine.
‘I dare say you have to go and do some . . . reporting, too.’ The way Ishbel said it seemed to betray something seething under the surface. Why is she selling her story to him when she clearly knows he’s hateful? Birch threw Amy another look, and Amy shook her head: No idea.
‘This evening, perhaps,’ Ishbel was saying. ‘I need to go and have a bit of a rest, and a think. But we could meet this evening.’
‘That sounds great.’ Birch rolled her eyes – Lockley was practically slavering.
‘I have one condition,’ Ishbel said.
Lockley’s body language shifted, but he said, ‘Name it.’
Ishbel nodded at the phone, still hanging in his hand.
‘That video you’ve just filmed,’ she said. ‘It is not to become public before we have spoken.’
At this, Lockley glanced back at Birch and Amy. Birch tried to make her face as impassive as possible.
‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ he said, ‘why? The video isn’t of you, but of DI Birch here, and some protesters who were here a moment ago. You only appear at the very end there, and I would happily edit that part out.’
Ishbel’s face hardened.
