It was a converted manor house, massive bay windows staring out over the Sound of Sleat and to the jagged horizon of the mainland in the distance. The granite facade was pristine and seemed to glitter in the afternoon light, while the window frames and guttering glowed with the sheen of fresh paint and fastidious care. In the small car park to the right of the building, Doug could see a cluster of high-end saloons, tourers, Range Rovers and what he was sure was a Ferrari neatly parked up in individual bays. At a rough guess, he thought there was more than a million-and-a-half worth of automobiles sitting in the lot.
The other side of the house was dominated by a huge glass sun-room in which Doug could see tables dotted around, making the most of the views. The dining room obviously, offering the spectacular views as a free appetiser or dessert.
With a bemused chuckle, Doug started the engine and bumped his car slowly over the cattle grid set into the tarmac at the gate and crept up the driveway, suddenly aware that his pride and joy – a Mazda RX-8 he’d bought after his previous car was lobotomised by a hired thug with a grudge and a penchant for knives – wasn’t the king of the road he thought it was.
He parked up as far from the main body of cars as he could and killed the engine, suddenly nervous. What the hell was he doing here anyway? He should be back home, chasing the story, no matter what Walter said. Since when was a little thing like seeing someone murdered in front of his eyes going to keep him away from the front page? Was this a test? Had he failed Harvey by quitting the story and coming here?
He jumped out of the car, hoping movement would quieten his thoughts and the images of Greig’s silent scream. Turned and stopped dead when he saw Harvey standing at the main entrance, lounging against one of the sandstone pillars that framed the door and watching Doug with a look of cool amusement in his eyes.
He was greyer than Doug remembered, the hair was thinner and the waist was thicker, but the face hadn’t changed. Round cheeks and a thick jaw hidden behind a dark beard that was flecked through with white. “My Tipp-Ex stains,” Harvey had called them. “Danny DeVito’s grumpy Scottish uncle Harvey”, the reporters had called him back at the Tribune. Looking at him now, Doug couldn’t argue with the comparison, or his own private nickname for Harvey – “Scrooge McFuck”.
Harvey leaned forward, held up a slender walking cane with what looked like a silver handle. “You going to stand there gawping all day, Douglas, or are you going to make an old man come to you?”
“Time it would take you, deadline would be passed and we’d all be in the shit,” he replied, striding forward, hand outstretched. Doug’s slender hand disappeared into the warmth of Harvey’s paw-like grip. Harvey shook vigorously, patting Doug on the shoulder as he did – classic Scottish male shorthand for a hug.
“Good to see you, Harvey,” Doug said.
“Likewise, son,” Harvey replied, his eyes darting over Doug’s face, seeming to read every line and blemish. “How you holding up?”
Good question. “I’m fine, Harvey. Now. Not sure it’s totally sunk in yet…”
The silent scream on Greig’s face.
(Look at me.)
The feel of his blood, sticky, hot, between fingers.
Harvey gave him another tap on the shoulder, breaking him from his thoughts. “Aye, right,” he grunted. “’Mon inside. Esther’s desperate to see you. Then we can have a drink and catch up. Some things are better talked about when you’re not totally sober.”
• • •
Seeing Esther was the second surprise of the day and, after the discovery of the hotel, it was like a kick in the teeth.
Doug remembered her as a vital woman, with hair so black it shone, delicate features, porcelain skin and a figure that had almost made him call her Mrs Robinson the first time they met. Now she sat propped up in a bed, skin a sickly grey, hair bleached white with age and the stress of illness, her features subsiding as if the foundations beneath them were starting to decay.
Which, in a way, they were.
“Douglas,” she said, her pale blue eyes dancing with the old amusement he remembered so well. “Good to see you. You well, son?”
Her hand scrabbled over the sheet for his. He almost flinched away from the suppurating cold when he took it.
“I’m fine, Esther, really,” he said, giving her his best empathetic smile and realising it was Harvey who taught him it in the first place. Make the interviewee trust you, Douglas.
“More importantly, how are you? Harvey told me the doctors say you’re doing better?”
She snorted, the sound of diamond being run across glass. “Aye, it shows, doesn’t it? Good days and bad days, Douglas. The chemo was awful but they think they’ve got all of it now.”
Harvey had filled Doug in on the way up the grand double staircase to the suite of private rooms he called home. Bowel cancer. They had found it a couple of months ago, after she’d started to have stomach pains and noticed blood in the toilet. Tests followed by an operation to remove the tumour, then chemotherapy to destroy anything they may have missed. Now it was a waiting game as she recovered before going back for a follow-up check. It was hanging over both of them, the unspoken axe waiting to fall.
“Well, if there’s anything you need…”
She smiled, patted his hand. It was like being caressed by slivers of ice. “You’re a good ’un Douglas, always were. I’m fine. What I need is for you to take this one to the bar and buy you a drink, give me five minutes’ peace.”
Doug gave a small salute. “Happy to oblige, Esther,” he said, feeling his stomach lurch and his mouth go dry at the thought of more booze.
“You heard the lady, Harvey, buy me a drink. And make it a double.”
22
The car bumped across the Forth Road Bridge, a steady thump-a-thump of percussion as the tyres’ contact with the tarmac was interrupted by the steel expansion joints set into the bridge at regular intervals. On the right, the railway bridge dominated the skyline, a jutting sculpture in red steel like a giant’s Meccano creation, trains crawling over its back as they ran from the Highlands all the way down, across the Forth estuary and on to Edinburgh and further south. In the beginning, trains had been an elegant form of travel; steam engines and dining cars and the adventure of the journey. These days they were overpriced, under-maintained steel boxes crammed with weary commuters forced out of Edinburgh by ever-rising house prices.
To the left, the skeleton of another bridge was emerging from beneath scaffolding and cranes – a new Road Bridge to help ease congestion and take the strain off the original. It didn’t take a genius to figure out which of the three would still be considered a wonder of the industrial world another hundred years from now.
After the connection was made between Greig’s and Charlie’s murders, Burns had called a conference of all the CID officers working the cases and briefed them. Everything was now to be cross-checked, to see what and where the connection between the two men was. One killer, one motive, two deaths. Simple maths.
“And,” Burns said, his voice more blunt and doom-laden than normal, “the Chief is now taking a personal interest in this case, so I do not want any fuck-ups. Clear? Do the job and do it right.”
“Nae wonder the Chief’s interested,” DC Eddie King muttered under his breath. “Course he is. Guns involved now. Sexy.”
Susie arched an eyebrow. She hadn’t thought King capable of anything that came that close to insubordination. Or humour, for that matter.
Assignments were given out and the officers went back to their work. Including Susie, whose first job was to drag herself across to Fife and interview the mother of the dead kid from the ERI.
Burns cut her off on the way out of the CID suite, walking slightly in front of her and craning down to whisper in her ear, his breath heavy with the crappy peppermints he used to try and disguise the lingering fug of stale cigarette smoke.
“You heard what I said, Drummond, and I meant it. You’re working the cases, both of them. But the Chief looking at this puts a whole different level of shit on the table, so I need to be seen to be playing by the rules. Which means keeping you out of the way for a while. Clear?”
His gaze was boring into her, unblinking, something halfway between fury and pleading in his eyes. The Chief must have given him a hell of a talking-to about this. And suddenly, Susie felt a wave of gratitude for Burns. He was a grumpy bastard and impossible to please, but here he was playing a high-stakes game with his bosses to make sure she got the chance to be a detective rather than an embarrassment better forgotten.
So she headed for Rosyth, which sat just across the bridge, on the shore of the Forth. She vaguely remembered something Doug had said about calls to rescue a ferry link from the port at Rosyth to Zeebrugge – he had mostly grumbled about being given the story when there were more important stories he could be covering – but other than that, the town was alien to her. It was her first visit. She wondered if it would be her last.
She followed the sat-nav, driving past a small row of shops and a petrol station, traditional buildings slowly petering out as she crossed the no man’s land where old Rosyth gave way to the new-build housing estates that seemed to creep into every bit of empty land in the country.
Diane Pearson lived in a small, anonymous terraced house in an estate that looked identical to about three others Susie had driven past. The small front garden was neat, bordered with a riot of flowers and shrubs that meant nothing to Susie. Her dad would have been able to name every one of them, though. He was a keen gardener, a passion he had tried, without success, to pass on to Susie.
Another disappointment for him. A daughter when he wanted a son. A police officer when he wanted a lawyer. A gym bunny when he wanted a gardener.
She sighed. Old wounds.
She bumped the car up on to the pavement at the front of the house and parked up. Saw the blinds in the front window of Pearson’s house twitch.
She had called ahead and made an appointment, so she was expected. Question was, what type of reception would she get? In Susie’s experience, calling on the relatives of the recently deceased got three main reactions – shock, sorrow or fury. Susie was hoping for fury. Shock and sorrow had a numbing effect, made people forget things, made them near-impossible to talk to. But fury had to be expressed. And that meant talking. Maybe shouting. Maybe swearing. Susie didn’t care what it was. At least if Diane Pearson was talking, she might say something useful.
The door swung open before Susie was halfway up the drive, Diane Pearson standing framed there. She was a tall, rangy woman, long blonde hair shot through with streaks of silver. The file Susie had read before leaving put her age at fifty-two, but she looked older. Deep wrinkles had been worn into her forehead like grooves, probably from the squinting she did through the thick glasses she wore, while the morning sun, which should have made her look better, gave her a sickly, almost translucent sheen. It made Susie think of her mother and the long years before her death, the endless trips back and forth to the hospital as the Parkinson’s slowly corrupted her body, leaching away her strength and dignity, coring her out and leaving her a hollow, empty shell; a cruel parody of the vibrant woman Susie had known growing up. She died of pneumonia, lying in a hospital bed surrounded by machines and doctors, her skin sallow, a corpse being forced to live.
When she went, Susie was ashamed to admit that her overriding reaction had been not grief, but relief.
Diane offered a smile as Susie walked up the steps to the house, noticing the grab rail that had been fitted to the wall, there to help with Daniel. He had been born with what the file described as “severe medical and learning difficulties”, specialists putting his mental age at around eight. It made Diane Pearson’s appearance make sense to Susie. A single mum working a full-time job and looking after a child with the strength and impulses of a man and the control of an infant? Not a life she would choose.
“Detective Drummond?” Diane asked, holding out a thin hand. Susie shook it. It was surprisingly warm, the grip strong and assured, making a lie of Susie’s first impressions of the woman. She should have known better – being the sole carer for Daniel would require all kinds of strength, mental and physical.
“Mrs Pearson? Yes. And, please, it’s Susie. Thank you for seeing me, especially at the moment.”
Diane took a deep breath. “Yes, ah… well. Please, come in, Susie.”
• • •
The living room was small and cluttered, a thin patina of dust draped over the knick-knacks, ornaments and toys clustered around the bookshelves and mantelpiece, which framed an old-style gas fire. An old television sat in the corner of the room, the DVD player below stacked high with DVDs featuring Batman, Spider-Man and a range of other multi-coloured heroes Susie couldn’t name.
The walls were covered with pictures of Diane and Daniel, as though she was displaying a visual history of his life, from the first days in hospital to the man grinning at the camera, open smile showing a row of small, incredibly white teeth, the streets of Edinburgh behind him. He looked like his mother, Susie thought. Something in the shape of the face and the mouth. And the fine blonde hair that seemed to glow in the picture. It was, Susie knew, the way Diane Pearson’s hair would have looked a decade ago. None of the pictures featured anyone who could have been Daniel’s father.
Diane gestured towards a small couch jammed against the wall of the room, bracketed by coffee tables crammed with yet more ornaments.
“Please, Susie. Have a seat. Can I get you a drink? Tea? Coffee?”
“No, Mrs Pearson, thank you,” Susie said, sitting down. The couch was hard and unforgiving. She made an obvious glance towards the door. “Are you on your own, Mrs Pearson? I thought a liaison officer from the local station was sent to sit with you?”
“Oh, you mean that PC, eh, Mathers?” Diane replied, easing herself into a chair to the right of the couch, facing the TV. “I sent her away. I wanted some time to myself.”
Susie nodded. “I’m sorry to intrude, Mrs Pearson, I understand this is a difficult time for you. I just have a few questions, then I’ll be on my way.”
Diane nodded, wearily. “I’ve been a social worker and counsellor for more than thirty years, Susie, I know how this works. Procedure. Though I’m not sure how I can help. Danny was in an accident, a bad one. They took him to the hospital, operated. Then I got the call saying…” Her voice hitched in her throat. “Saying…”
Susie gave her best understanding look. She hated this part of the job, intruding on private grief, asking questions that meant the bereaved had to face up to horrible possibilities and thoughts at the worst moment of their life. Bad enough to lose a loved one. But to even acknowledge that it might have been deliberate, that someone had meant harm to the person who meant everything to them?
Why the hell had she wanted this career again?
“So, ah, Mrs Pearson, what did happen to Daniel?” She knew the answer, the hospital report told her that much, but she wanted to hear it in Pearson’s own words.
Diane shifted in her seat, fiddled with her glasses. Her gaze came to rest on the dead TV screen, as though she were watching what had happened replay on it.
“As you no doubt know, Susie, Danny had some health issues. Learning difficulties due to autism. I work in Edinburgh, so made sure he was in day care when I was there. He loves going through on the trains every day, riding over the bridge. He counts the beams, you know, knows how many there are off by heart.” She smiled. A mother’s pride. Susie picked up on her using the present tense, felt a pang of regret when she realised Diane would become aware of it herself all too soon.
“Anyway, he was out on a day trip with the carers, in Edinburgh. Normally Danny hates the crowds, but he loves the trams – the idea of trains in the city seemed to light up his
imagination.” She pointed a finger to the ceiling. “You should see his room. Lego models of the city, with the trams running through it. According to Lee, Danny’s carer, they were on St Andrew Square. It’s the best place for Danny to see the trams as there’s a stop there and the park is just opposite if the crowds become overbearing and he needs a break in an open space. Lee says he wanted to get a picture of a tram running down the hill onto Princes Street with his phone, so he gets out in front of the tram, leans in too far into the road and…” She glanced at Susie, face full of pleading. Don’t make me say this, her eyes said.
Susie nodded. “And he leaned in too closely, lost his footing and his head was hit by the tram as he fell.” She’d read the incident report. It was a cruel, freakish accident. He’d stumbled forward just at the wrong moment, hit the tram at precisely the wrong angle. A few months earlier, a tram had clipped a girl who was running across the road, messing around with her pals. She’d more or less bounced off the carriage, escaping with a bruised bum and a dented ego, while Danny had paid a much higher price.
Senseless.
“I got the call at work,” Diane continued, voice growing colder. “He was taken to the ERI. Had bleeding on the brain, which meant they had to operate to ease the pressure. And then…”
Susie let the words hang in the air for a moment, feeling their weight fill up the room, making it stuffy, oppressive. She spoke in a near-whisper. It felt like she was shouting in a church.
“Mrs Pearson. Diane. Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Danny for any reason?”
Diane’s head darted up, glasses flaring in the light. Her hands clamped down on the arms of the chair. And when she spoke, Susie finally knew what her reaction to the death of her son was.
Rage.
“Who the hell would want to hurt Danny?” she sneered, her pale skin blotching with hectic patches of colour. “He was a child. Innocent. His world revolved around me, his friends at the care centre and trains. Why would anyone want to do him harm?”
The Storm Page 8
