‘Okay, okay. I’ll explain but let’s eat dinner first. If you knew how tough it was for me to cook this bloody stuff, then you’d know I don’t want it to be wasted. Another drink?’
They ate with little more than polite, strained conversation, each appetite ruined by the anticipation or dread of what was to be said.
‘First of all, Danny,’ Rachel began at last, ‘I want to tell you about my dad. He was a cop, just like me, just like you were. He’s ages with you so maybe you even knew him. His name was Alan Narey and he was a chief inspector in Central Scotland. No?’
Danny shook his head.
‘He was from Glasgow, born and bred, but he preferred not to work over the shop. So he worked out of Stirling, drove in every day. He figured, given the nature of the job, it would be better for me and my mum if he didn’t have too many enemies who knew where we lived. That’s the way he always was — put us ahead of anything else. He could have made at least superintendent if he’d sacrificed a bit more but it wasn’t in his nature. Not that he wasn’t dedicated to the job; he was. He cared about people and about the right thing being done. He was my hero. He still is.’
Rachel stopped and took another swig of wine. When she spoke again, her voice was stronger.
‘Anyway, you’ll remember the Lady in the Lake case, the winter of 1993 and ’94.’
Danny’s eyes furrowed.
‘Lake of Menteith?’ he answered. ‘Young woman found battered to death on the island in the middle? I remember it. It made headlines for weeks, months.’
‘Inchmahome,’ she confirmed. ‘My dad worked the case. Worked it for months, maybe the only time in his whole career he lived and breathed a case twenty-four hours a day and me and Mum never saw him. The victim wasn’t that much older than me and I always wondered if that was part of it, why it got to him so much. But I think it was just because he cared, wanted justice for her. You know how it is, Danny.’
Neilson nodded slowly and gravely. He knew how it was all right. He’d worked on a series of high-profile killings back in the early seventies: four young women who were murdered after nights out in Glasgow. They’d never caught the killer and there weren’t many days that went by that Danny didn’t think about it and feel guilty about not having done his job.
‘Yeah, I know, love. It eats away at you and it doesn’t stop.’
‘Yes, it does,’ she agreed, her voice wavering again. ‘My dad’s not well, Danny. He’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.’
Rachel let the sentence hang there and Tony flirted with the notion that she was playing this for sympathy. He immediately reproached himself for thinking it.
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Rachel,’ Danny comforted her. ‘It must be hard’
She nodded, her eyes on the table.
‘It’s hardest for him. He’s a proud man, used to looking after us and now he’s struggling to look after himself. He can’t always tell you what day it is and he forgets people’s names. He puts the oven on and leaves food to burn; he misses appointments and forgets birthdays. It might not sound much but it’s… it’s like you said, it’s eating away at him. I can see my dad slipping away bit by bit.’
Tony got out of his chair to go to comfort Rachel but she waved him back down.
‘His biggest regret is that girl who was found on Inchmahome — his last major case and the one that stays with him. He frets about it, Danny, and I know he wakes up in the middle of the night haunted by it.’
Neilson sat with his chin on his hands, looking at Rachel, taking in every word she said but giving nothing away.
‘I can’t do much for him,’ she continued. ‘I can’t give him some magic pill to make it all better. I can’t pay for some Harley Street doctor to cure him because there is no cure. I can’t even look after him because he’s in a home. There’s only one thing I know how to do and that’s my job.’
Danny slowly took one of his hands away from beneath his chin and held it up in front of him, his palm facing Rachel in a ‘stop’ gesture.
‘I don’t want to interrupt you, Rachel, but I can see how much this is hurting you. I know you are going to tell me what you want from me when you’re good and ready. Whatever it is, if I can do it, then I will. Okay?’
Rachel smiled sadly and nodded.
‘I know you wouldn’t be asking unless you felt you really needed to,’ Danny continued. ‘Just tell me what you want.’
It hurt Winter to see Rachel upset and that was bad enough but it also stung that he was being held at arm’s length. She was the one who had to help her dad, he knew that, and it made it difficult for her to let him in. There had always been this invisible police tape between them when it came to her work and he could feel it again now, putting him in his place.
‘Why did neither of you tell me about what was happening tonight? Okay, I get that you might need Danny’s help with whatever you’re planning, Rachel, but you could have told me.’
She looked at him, a faint smile playing across her lips.
‘Boys and their egos,’ she teased and she rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not Danny I need, you idiot. It’s you.’
Tony brightened briefly before confusion set in again.
‘I need help from someone I can trust,’ she explained. ‘I can’t do this by the book and I can’t ask anyone from the job. And you… bizarrely, you have a knack for this. When the sniper was taking out the drug lords, you saw things we missed and you instinctively knew what to do. You knew how to join the dots. I need that now.’
Tony nodded, appeased but still uncertain.
‘It’s just that I’m not sure you’re capable of doing everything that’s needed on your own, so we need Danny to help you out,’ she continued. ‘He’s been round the block and you always say he’s the smartest man you’ve ever known. Every cop I know in Strathclyde who knew Danny says he was top drawer. We need him. I need both of you.’
Both men just looked at her, waiting for the punchline.
‘Danny, my dad had a suspect for the killing. It was never anything firm but his nose told him this guy was involved — a student teacher named Laurence Paton. He hung about the scene when they did a reconstruction a year later and admitted he’d been in the area at the time of the killing. He was nervous, evasive. My dad liked him for the murder but never had any evidence to link him, so nothing was ever done. He had Paton in a couple of times under the pretence of interviewing potential witnesses but nothing.’
Danny listened intently, saying nothing.
‘On the anniversary of the killing, we went to the Lake of Menteith and made a few waves, asked a few questions, unsettled some dust. Then we went to Paton’s house. I made sure Paton knew I was there even though he couldn’t have known who I was. Three days later, Paton falls off a ladder while doing DIY outside his house and dies on the spot. What does your copper’s nose tell you about that, Danny?’
The older man took a long draw on his beer and let it swill around his mouth, savouring the taste and buying himself time to think. He drew the back of his hand across his mouth and looked at Rachel.
‘It stinks,’ he told her. ‘I was never one for coincidences.’
‘Nor me,’ she agreed.
Danny chewed on his bottom lip as he considered the options and tried to second-guess what her plan was. Whatever it was, he knew he would agree to it. His blood was already racing and he hadn’t felt that in a while. It felt dangerous and good. It felt alive.
‘So what is Central saying?’ he asked her.
‘Not much. They are insistent it was an accident. Say they have a witness that corroborates it. They say there’s nothing to prove Paton had anything to do with the lake killing and I need to keep my nose out of it.’
‘Then you’d better do that,’ Danny mused. ‘We, on the other hand…’
She smiled, grateful that he understood.
‘I’m going to ask this for the last time,’ Tony grumbled. ‘What do you want me and Danny to do?’
‘If Laurence Paton killed this girl, then I want to find something to prove it. I want
you
to find something. As I said, I need you to do this for me.’
‘And how am I going to do that?’
‘I want you and Danny to break into Paton’s house. I want you to search his home, hack his computer — whatever it takes. I want you to find me proof that my dad was right and Paton killed the Lady in the Lake.’
CHAPTER 18
Tuesday 4 December. 1.00 a.m.
Winter and Neilson parked quietly on Sutherland Avenue, a good few hundred yards away from the corner where it adjoined Wallace Place. Danny had instructed Tony to try to get halfway between the street lights to make best use of such darkness as there was. They quietly got out of the car, shivering as the cold bit into them, and started out on foot.
A glance behind them saw the splendour of Stirling Castle, lit up in its festive finery and sitting proudly on the rock overlooking the town that thought it was a city. Ahead were the snow-covered Ochil Hills, framing the horizon but disappearing softly into a frozen haze.
Danny had driven through to Stirling the night before and checked out the situation. He’d gone so far as to wander into Laurence Paton’s back garden unchallenged. He said there was no sign of a burglar alarm and breaking into the place would be a piece of cake. He’d admitted a career that included many hours mopping up after house break-ins was a great apprenticeship for doing it yourself. He’d also gone back that afternoon and knocked on Paton’s door, getting no answer, then tried a neighbour, saying he was a friend hoping to pay his condolences. The neighbour had told him that Irene, Paton’s wife, had gone to stay with family and wouldn’t be back till the next day. It gave them a one-night window of opportunity.
What if someone had actually answered Paton’s door, Tony had asked him. Danny had sighed and retorted that he wasn’t so stupid as to have left it to chance and had phoned the house twice before making his move to be sure that the place was empty.
But what if there was a burglar alarm, Winter persisted — a unit hidden out of sight maybe? Danny had exhaled again and explained that a burglar alarm couldn’t stop anyone from breaking into a house and it wasn’t designed to do so. It was a deterrent and there wasn’t much point in an alarm that couldn’t be seen.
The pair walked silently down Sutherland Avenue, breath freezing before them, lost in their own thoughts about what lay ahead and what had already been. Winter had considered telling Danny about the dreams he’d been having, the ones he couldn’t tell Rachel about. In the end, he decided to keep them to himself but couldn’t help but wonder if the other two were dreaming the same dreams he was.
They had started the night after he and Rachel had been to the island and he’d ‘seen’ Lily lying on the frozen ground, abandoned and alone. She’d lain there for four months and part of her was still there, waiting to go home. He’d tried to photograph that part of her, that thing that might be soul or plasma or memory.
The house where Paton had lived was half of the first semi at the end of the street and only a thigh-high fence and a neighbour’s garden separated them from the dead man’s back door. The gardens on Paton’s side of the street were maybe thirty yards long and backed on to more gardens coming the other way, separated by a six-foot-high wall. Bedroom lights still flamed in a few of the homes on the other side of the wall but those neighbouring Paton’s house were, reassuringly, shrouded in darkness.
As they approached, Danny reached into the pockets of his jacket and produced two balaclavas. When the headgear was wordlessly shared and pulled on, it was Tony’s turn to dig into his pockets and come out with two pairs of nitrile gloves and two pairs of elasticated shoe covers, all liberated from the office stores. They stopped briefly before the rust-coloured fence and slipped the protective coverings over their feet and hands, ready for the task ahead.
With an easy stride that belied his age and increasing girth, Neilson stepped over the fence first, followed by Winter. The photographer was the taller of the two by an inch or so but his uncle Danny was easily the bigger man. Sometimes he looked as broad as he was tall, burly and thickset, and not someone to be messed with despite being in his sixties. The pair of them padded across the manicured lawn, their covered footsteps leaving a crunchy wake in the frosted grass, then stepped across a narrow area laid out with stone chips so as to avoid unnecessary noise. No fence separated the neighbour’s house from Paton’s and they simply walked across the grass to the English teacher’s back door.
The houses in Wallace Place dated back to just after the First World War and that, according to Danny, was good news for them and any other would-be housebreakers.
‘Old house, old locks,’ he’d told Winter.
As they stood outside the back door, their breath clouding the air in front of them, Tony moved from foot to foot in a vain attempt to stop the frost from invading his feet until a glare from Danny brought him grudgingly to a standstill. Neilson reached inside his jacket and brought out a selection of thin pieces of card, the moonlight reflecting off their plastic surfaces. As he approached the door, Winter turned his back, looking around edgily in case their arrival had been noticed and fearful that the time it would take to open the door would put them at risk.
Tony had barely begun to scope the lights in the houses beyond the garden wall, wondering if anyone was watching them through barely closed curtains and reaching for a telephone to call the police, when he heard a hissing sound behind him. He turned and Danny was standing inside Paton’s house, gesturing for Winter to join him inside.
Taking a deep breath, Winter crossed over the threshold into criminal activity and stepped into Paton’s kitchen, Neilson quickly and quietly closing the door behind him. Both of the men had torches, Danny having been insistent that they couldn’t take the chance of turning on the house lights. With no sign of a computer in the kitchen, Neilson led them into a hallway, their plastic-covered feet making no more than quiet sliding sounds as they moved slowly across the carpets.