Nora looked distressed. ‘David won’t talk about Terri any more. He says she’s as dead to us as Philip.’ She threw Magnus an agonised glance. ‘Terri lied over and over again. She wasn’t Terri any more. She would say anything, do anything to get the drug. It broke David’s heart.’
‘You mentioned Philip’s guidance teacher, Mr Beattie.’
‘A kind man. He tried to help Terri after Philip died. He runs the school sailing club. He taught them both to sail.’
By the time they came to leave, Magnus’s questioning had revealed much about the Docherty family. How it had operated up until Philip’s death, and how they had survived afterwards. Terri had come from a good strong home. It made Rhona sad to think even that hadn’t been enough to save her. No wonder her parents were devastated. Rhona wondered how they managed to breathe, let alone function.
Nora didn’t look too keen when Magnus asked for directions to Inverkip Marina.
‘David won’t talk to you,’ she said, apologising in advance.
‘We’ll try anyway.’ Magnus clasped Nora’s hand. ‘I want to thank you, Nora. What you’ve told me has helped.’
A flicker of a smile crossed her face. Rhona prayed that Magnus wasn’t giving the poor woman false hope.
The Kip Marina lay to their west. Rhona was less familiar with this stretch of the road, although she remembered once walking as far as the Cloch Lighthouse. A little past Cloch Point Magnus asked her to draw into a car park next to a picnic area and got out, saying he had to make a call. Five minutes later he was back.
They completed the remaining miles to Inverkip in silence. Rhona had no idea what the call was about or what Magnus was thinking, and he didn’t seem in the mood to share it with her.
The area around the marina was a hive of activity in the sunshine. Sailing the west coast of Scotland was a popular pastime. A sign near the gate informed them that any visitors should make themselves known at reception. The woman in the small office gave them a sharp look and asked for identification, which she examined closely.
‘You’re not from the press then?’
‘We’re definitely not from the press,’ Magnus assured her.
‘I don’t want folk hounding David. God knows how he manages to get out of bed in the morning, let alone turn up for work.’
Docherty was in the servicing yard, a sleek motor yacht hoisted above him. He must have heard their approach, but didn’t look around from his work painting the keel.
‘Mr Docherty.’
‘Aye.’
‘May I speak to you?’
The muscles on the man’s shoulders bunched as he slowly turned around to face them.
Rhona saw the likeness immediately. Of the two children, Terri looked most like her father. Rhona wondered if they were alike in temperament.
Docherty’s expression remained blank while Magnus explained who they were. ‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about your daughter, Mr Docherty, if that’s all right.’
Docherty turned his back on them and went back to painting the keel. ‘My daughter’s dead.’
‘Mr Docherty . . .’ Rhona began.
‘I said my daughter is dead.’ The words came out in an angry staccato.
‘We don’t think Terri is dead,’ said Magnus.
At this, Docherty’s head jerked around. The brush remained poised in the air, red paint dribbling down the handle onto his hand. A flicker of something like suspicion lit his eyes.
‘You’ve been meeting Terri without telling your wife, haven’t you, Mr Docherty?’
Docherty turned swiftly away.
‘When did you last see Terri?’ Magnus’s voice had changed tone. His jaw was set, his stare steely.
The tension between the two men was palpable. Still Docherty didn’t look at Magnus or answer him.
‘We have reason to believe you met with Terri the night she disappeared.’
A police car swung into the yard, Bill in the driving seat, McNab at his side. Now Rhona knew who Magnus had been talking to on the phone.
The car drew alongside and Docherty caught sight of it. Rhona watched as the paintbrush slid from his hand and rattled down the side of the keel, splattering paint like sprayed blood.
‘Mr Docherty,’ Bill said. ‘I’d like you to accompany me to the police station to be interviewed in connection with the disappearance of your daughter Terri.’
DOCHERTY WAS SLUMPED
in the back seat next to McNab. It looked as though he was on standby. Bill had tried suggesting he call his wife, tell her where he was going, but had got nothing back but a blank look.
After his initial shock at their request to accompany them to the station, Docherty had come quietly. Bill wondered if Docherty cared much about anything any more. According to Beattie, Terri’s father had forbidden her ever to contact the family again. That’s why she’d called Beattie for help. Bill wasn’t impressed with the former student counsellor, nor his account of events. Leanne, on the other hand, he did believe. She said Terri and her father had always been at odds. It had just got worse after her brother died. ‘Terri said Philip was her dad’s favourite. She’d got it into her head he’d rather she’d died.’
Leanne claimed Docherty had come to the flat, furious that his wife had been putting money into Terri’s account and accusing Terri of spending it on drugs. ‘He lost it. Told Terri as far as he was concerned, she might as well be dead.’ A week later, a distressed Terri had seen her father’s car cruising her patch, watching her pick up punters.
There but for the grace of God
, thought Bill, as he glanced at the man in the rear-view mirror. Illness and death had torn this man’s family apart, maybe even tipped him over the edge. Then Terri, the black sheep, had taken them down an addict’s route, little more than a living death.
On the way back to the station, Janice called to tell Bill that Gary Forbes had been brought in. She’d also managed to contact Posh Guy, whose real name was Ray Irvine. He’d agreed to come along too, after asking that his name be kept out of the papers. Gary was a motor mechanic, Ray an investment banker. It seemed visiting prostitutes was a habit shared by all sections of Scottish society.
Bill instructed Janice to contact Beattie as well.
‘According to Magnus, Beattie taught the Docherty kids to sail, which meant he knew them both well. He managed to forget that little piece of information during his earlier interview, conveniently.’
‘What about Geordie?’
‘Him too. And put them all in the same room to wait.’
Let them sweat it out together. Old Geordie would be the one to suffer least. ‘And make sure Geordie gets a chocolate biscuit with his tea,’ Bill had added.
They hadn’t had any luck putting together Lucie’s client base. There had been no handbag or mobile with the body, and Minty wasn’t likely to reveal who used Lucie’s services, even if they found him. Despite numerous appeals for her clients to get in touch, the response had been almost nonexistent. No one wanted
to be linked to a murder, especially the murder of a prostitute.
They were stuck in a tailback on the Kingston Bridge when the call came through. A ‘hidden Glasgow’ enthusiast, trying to follow the underground course of the Molendinar Burn, had spotted what looked like a body. The burn surfaced briefly just south of Duke Street, close to the spot Terri had disappeared.
‘He says it looks like a woman,’ Janice told Bill.
‘Contact Dr MacLeod. Tell her to get there as soon as she can.’
Bill kept his reply to a minimum. He didn’t want Docherty to realise what the call was about. Bill glanced in the mirror again, but Docherty appeared as impassive as ever.
Maybe the online auction had already taken place. Maybe the body Rhona was about to view was all that remained of Docherty’s daughter. Bill would have to wait until he’d offloaded Docherty before finding out for himself.
THE MOLENDINAR BURN
emerged from a culvert under Duke Street and disappeared a few yards later, beneath a deserted goods yard. It was overgrown and inaccessible and only the sound of running water warned you of the burn’s presence. Above the southern culvert, the ground rose in a perpendicular wall topped by a high wooden fence. To the west lay the car park of a business centre, surrounded by an eight-foot high metal barrier.
It would take a determined man to get into a position to see the burn at all, and Mr White was just such a man. He was currently standing in the car park, earnestly clutching a digital camera, his face pale and shocked.
‘I went to the goods yard and got a shot over that fence. It was more difficult from here,’ he told McNab. ‘You can’t see much because of the undergrowth. I stuck the camera through the railings, clicked and hoped for the best.’
McNab had downloaded the photographs from Mr White’s camera to his laptop and was flicking through them, with Mr White giving a running commentary.
‘That’s the outfall at Hogganfield Loch, where the burn starts. It flows under Wishart Street on the western flank of the Necropolis. Then Duke Street. Then here.’
McNab stopped at the photograph that had started the panic. The lower culvert was in deep shadow, but the object lodged in its entrance was definitely a body.
Bill couldn’t believe where he was standing. The building in front of him had been part of his school, St Kentigern’s. At that time, a high stone wall had run alongside the burn. To peek over, you had to ask for a backie off a mate.
The Molendinar might look like just a wee burn, but any self-respecting Glaswegian knew that St Kentigern, or St Mungo as he became better known, had established Glasgow by building a monastery on its banks. A monastery that became Glasgow Cathedral.
Bill swung his gaze across the stream to the back of the now derelict Great Eastern Hotel, once Glasgow’s largest hostel for homeless men. At school, they’d called it Heartbreak Hotel. He’d never realised then, how apt the name was. Over a hundred men, each living in a seven-foot-square cubicle.
It wouldn’t be allowed now, a junior school next door to a doss house. He’d heard the building was going to be converted into luxury flats, but there were problems with the structure. Back then, it was famous for the number of lice crawling up its walls.
The mountain rescue crew had set up shop in the goods yard. McNab had sectioned off an area between
the fence and several piles of rubble and bricks, the demolished remains of a nearby railway building.
The brick piles were already causing Bill concern. If the murderer liked burying bodies in this area, the dump offered an ideal opportunity. Bill had ordered in the dog handlers to have a sniff around, just in case.
Mr White’s photograph only showed the lower half of the corpse. Until a team got down to the culvert they wouldn’t know if it was Terri or not. Bill was also worried about Leanne. He’d sent a uniform around to her flat, but she was nowhere to be found. He’d promised Cathy he would help the girl, but it looked as though Minty had got to her first.
Rhona, McNab and Sissons stood kitted up and ready to go down, Magnus watching from nearby. A portion of the wooden fence had already been removed to ease their descent. This wasn’t the first time Bill had had to use climbing experts to retrieve a body. A few years before, a young woman’s corpse had been spotted lying at the bottom of a gorge used for illegal dumping. It had been a nightmare of a crime scene from a forensic point of view. But not as bad as the body they’d found in the sewage treatment plant. Forensically examining tons of sewage demanded a stomach stronger than Bill’s.
Fortunately, the Molendinar Burn was fresh water from the nearby Hogganfield Loch. How fresh it was remained to be seen. Bill glanced up anxiously as an ominous cloud moved to obscure the sun. They’d been lucky up to now. Another dose of stair rods would
dump gallons of water in this waterway, resulting in a crime scene washed clean of evidence.
The first item to be lowered was the tent. It would keep the rain off the personnel and the exposed part of the body, but could do nothing to prevent a rise in the water level. A few spits of rain hit Bill’s head as Rhona followed Sissons over the edge. Once all three were safely down, Bill headed for Magnus. He wanted to hear what the professor had to say about the Docherty family, and Terri’s father in particular.
RHONA KNEW IT
wasn’t Terri as soon as she was close enough to get a better view of the legs. Terri was young and slim, and these thighs above black boots, suggested an older woman.
The body was wedged on a shallow ledge at the entrance to the lower culvert. A few feet further in, and she would have been hidden from view even for Mr White.
Her mouth had been roughly taped, her hands tied tightly behind her back. There was a hole on the left side of her head.
‘She was shot?’
‘At close range,’ Sissons said.
Shootings were rare in Scotland, unlike in many southern cities where gun culture was rife, especially in areas associated with crack cocaine.
‘Any sign of a bullet?’
‘Not so far.’
Rhona came to crouch beside the pathologist. At first glance, this looked nothing like the work of their killer. The only similarity lay in the outfit the victim wore; the tight skirt, the skimpy top that exposed rolls of flesh, and the fake leather knee-high boots.
Abrasions and lacerations covered the exposed parts of the body.
‘What about the scratches?’
‘At a guess, the water carried her over rough ground. I’ll know better when I’ve examined her properly.’ Sissons rose to his feet. ‘Okay, I’ll leave you to it. Let’s hope the rain keeps off.’
Bill arrived ten minutes after Sissons was pulled up. In the meantime McNab had raised the tent, having secured it on either bank. Rhona was inside sampling when Bill’s white-suited body appeared, his feet encased in regulation Wellingtons.
‘Not Terri, I hear?’ Bill’s relief was short-lived. As he peered at the sprawled corpse, half out of the gurgling water, his eyes widened in shock. ‘Jesus, it’s Cathy!’
‘You know her?’
Bill was finding it difficult to contain his emotions. ‘I spoke to her yesterday. She told me Minty was threatening Leanne. I said I would help the girl.’ His lips thinned in anger. ‘I bet that bastard Minty had something to do with this.’ He glanced into the culvert. ‘How the hell did he get her down here?’