Authors: Val McDermid
They stood around in an awkward grouping, nonplussed men and a woman who could afford to be relaxed because she believed she had nothing left to lose. Nobody spoke, and after a few minutes, she nodded again and went on her way without a backward glance. Only another oddity to chalk up to her nocturnal ramblings.
She was beginning to feel that sleep might be a possibility, so she cut down Henderson Street, past the Banana Flats where occasional lights gleamed, down towards the wide mouth of the Water of Leith. Not far to go now. Then she would fall into bed, maybe not even bothering to undress. At
last, she’d lose consciousness for a few hours. Enough to keep her functioning.
And tomorrow morning, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, head of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit, would be ready to deal with whatever crossed her desk. Hell mend anyone who suggested otherwise.
R
oland
Brown always left his house in Scotlandwell in plenty of time to cycle the six miles to his office in Kinross. Truth to tell, he set off ridiculously early because that way he could escape the hell that was breakfast with his three children. Other people’s kids seemed to be able to rub along pretty well, but his daughter and two sons existed in a state of constant warfare that had only intensified now the teenage hormones were starting to kick in. It started as soon as their eyes opened in the morning and carried on relentlessly till bedtime. Which was another source of perpetual battles. He’d recently come to the conclusion that although he loved his children – at least, he supposed he did – he really didn’t like them. It was a realisation he could share with nobody except the birds and the wildlife on his way to and from work.
Unlike humans, they wouldn’t judge him.
So he’d hammer along the Loch Leven trail, muttering his current annoyance as he pedalled, ridding himself of his rage with every downward thrust of his legs. By the time he reached the office, he was calm, unflustered and ready to settle down to his clients’ VAT returns and tax problems.
At
that time of the morning, it was a peaceful ride. Unless it was raining or snowing, there would be a scattering of dog walkers who would raise a hand or nod their heads in greeting as he hurtled past. In the summer, he’d occasionally encounter cyclists on touring trips. But generally, it was just him and the things he knew he should never say to his ungrateful, ill-mannered, self-absorbed children. People spoke about blaming the parents, but Roland refused to accept that he and his wife had been particularly catastrophic in their child-rearing. Some people were born twisted.
He rounded a long curve, the loch on his left, the early morning sun hitting his shoulder as he emerged from a clump of trees. Ahead he could see a clearing with a bench that took advantage of the view up the loch towards the Lomond hills. A figure was hunched on the wooden seat. Roland had never seen anybody sitting there before, and it was a surprise to see someone sitting down on what was a cold spring morning with a real nip in the air. There would be dew on that bench, no doubt about it.
As he drew nearer, he could see the man wasn’t so much hunched as slumped. Had he taken ill? Was that why he’d gone to sit down? Did he need help?
For a split second, Roland considered ignoring the man and pretending to himself there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. But he was a decent man at heart, so he slowed to a halt and wheeled his expensive mountain bike across the grass. ‘Are you all right, pal?’ he called as he approached.
No reply. Now he could see that the man’s head was at an odd angle and he seemed to have something brown and sticky matting his hair. Roland drew nearer, his brain refusing to process what he was seeing. And then it was impossible to ignore and all at once Roland’s bike was on the grass. Vomit sprayed the ground at his feet as he realised the man on the bench was never going to be all right again.
N
ine
o’clock and Karen was in the poky office at the back of the Gayfield Square station that housed the Historic Cases Unit. They were squeezed into the furthest corner, as if the high command wanted them out of sight and out of mind. Except when they cracked a major case, of course. Then Karen was dragged out of her remote cubbyhole and paraded in front of the media. It made her feel like a prize pig at an agricultural show. However, they were generally ignored for the rest of the time, which suited Karen. Nobody was looking over her shoulder, checking out what she was up to when she hunched in front of her computer screen, blowing on a flat white to cool it enough to drink.
First task of the day was to check her email, to see whether any of her pending cases had inched forward thanks to the forensic scientists who routinely re-examined evidence from old unsolved cases. Their results were often what set a fresh investigation in motion. Without a solid piece of new evidence, there was nowhere for Karen to go.
She was still skimming her mailbox when the door slowly opened to reveal the other half of the cold case team,
precariously balancing a paper plate supporting two bacon rolls on top of a large cardboard cup. Detective Constable Jason ‘the Mint’ Murray was as dexterous as he was quick on the uptake, which made Karen fear for the fate of his breakfast.
‘Morning,’ he grunted, miraculously negotiating his arrival without spillage. ‘I brought you a bacon roll.’
The gesture touched Karen more than it warranted. Jason seldom thought beyond his own needs, which was fine with Karen. She didn’t need a daily reminder of what she’d lost. ‘Thanks,’ she said, conscious of sounding less than grateful.
‘Any news?’ Jason took one of the rolls and handed Karen the plate. He yawned as he dropped into his chair. ‘Late one last night.’
‘Where were you?’ Karen really didn’t care. But she knew the value of small gestures when it came to cementing team loyalty. Even if they were only a team of two.
‘I went through to Kirkcaldy for my cousin’s birthday. We ended up on tequila shots in somebody’s kitchen. That’s the last thing I remember.’
‘I hope you got the train in this morning,’ Karen said sententiously.
‘Och, I feel fine. I’m a polis, nobody’s going to do me on a morning after.’
‘Not the point, Jason.’ Before she could deliver a lecture, her mobile rang. ‘DCI Pirie, Historic Cases Unit.’
The voice at the other end had the unmistakable vowels of Dundee. ‘Aye, this is Sergeant Torrance from Tayside. Traffic Division.’ He stopped abruptly, as if he’d given her enough information to be going on with.
‘Hello, Sergeant. How can I help you?’
‘Well, I think it might be me that can help you.’
More silence. Clearly she was going to have to work at extracting information from Sergeant Torrance. ‘An offer of
help always gets my day off to a good start. What is it you think you’ve got?’
‘You maybe saw on the news we had a bad crash at the weekend?’
‘Sorry, that one passed me by. What happened?’
‘Ach, a stupid boy showing off to his pals, more than likely. They lifted a Land Rover Defender and somersaulted it over a roundabout on the Perth road in the wee small hours. All three passengers smashed to bits, dead on arrival at Ninewells.’
Karen sucked her breath over her teeth in an expression of sympathy. She’d seen enough road accidents in her time to know the level of carnage they could produce. ‘That’d piss on your chips and no mistake.’
‘Aye. One of the officers attending, it was his first fatal RTA. I doubt he’ll get much sleep for a wee while. Anyway. The thing is, the driver’s still alive. He’s in a coma, like, but he’s hanging in there.’
Karen made an encouraging noise. ‘And you took a sample to check his blood alcohol.’
‘Correct. Which was, by the way, five times over the limit.’
‘Ouch. And I’m presuming you got the lab to run DNA?’
‘Well, it’s routine now.’ Sergeant Torrance didn’t sound like a man who thought that was a good use of Police Scotland’s budget.
‘I’m guessing that’s why you’re calling me?’
‘Aye. We got a hit on the DNA database. I don’t pretend to understand these things, but it wasn’t a direct hit. Well, it couldn’t have been, because it ties in with a twenty-year-old murder and this laddie’s only seventeen.’ The rustle of paper. ‘Apparently it’s what they call a familial hit. Whoever left his semen all over a rape murder victim in Glasgow twenty years ago was a close male relative of a wee Dundee gobshite called Ross Garvie.’
*
The
adrenaline rush of reopening a cold case never faded for Karen. The rest of her life might have gone to hell in a handcart, but excavating the past for its secrets still exerted its familiar pull on her. Yesterday she’d never heard of Tina McDonald. Today, the dead hairdresser was front and centre in Karen’s consciousness.
After she’d finished extracting all the information she could from Sergeant Torrance, Karen called the Mint over to her desk. ‘We’ve got a familial DNA hit on an open unsolved rape murder,’ she said, her fingers battering the keyboard as she googled the victim. She skimmed the thin results of her search, leaving it for later. There were more important things to set in motion.
Jason slumped into the chair opposite. In spite of his posture, his expression was alert. ‘I’ll not bother taking my jacket off, then.’
Both halves of the suit might have looked better if he’d taken it off before he went to sleep in it, Karen thought. ‘Tina McDonald. A hairdresser from Partick. Raped and strangled in Glasgow city centre on May seventeenth, 1996. A Friday night. Twenty-four when she died. You know the drill.’
Jason crammed the last chunk of his bacon roll into his mouth and nodded, chewing vigorously then swallowing hard. ‘I’ve to go to the warehouse and pull the files and the physical evidence. Take the evidence to Gartcosh to have the DNA checked again, then bring the files back here.’ It was the first phase of every cold case resurrection. He recited it like the mantra it had become for him.
‘Away you go, then. If you’re lucky with the traffic, you’ll be back by lunchtime and we can get stuck in this afternoon.’ Karen returned to the screen, flinching as Jason’s chair legs screeched on the tiled floor. These days, all her nerve endings seemed to be closer to the surface.
There wasn’t much online. Back in 1996, the news media
hadn’t really embraced the idea of digital platforms. There was plenty coverage of the Dunblane primary school massacre that year, but most of that was retrospective. What had happened to Tina McDonald had probably been well covered at the time, particularly by the tabloids. But it had more or less sunk without trace since.
Karen finally hit pay dirt with a website devoted to Glasgow murders. It spanned almost two hundred years and showed a devotion to detail that made her faintly queasy. She wondered whether her colleagues in the city knew about the site and the identity of its creator. He might be a bona fide obsessive. But he might be more than that. For now, however, she was grateful for his diligence.
When Tina McDonald left her cosy single-end flat in Havelock Street on Friday the 17th of May 1996, she couldn’t have known she’d never return. Twenty-four-year-old Tina was off on a girls’ night out with three workmates from the Hair Apparent salon on Byres Road to celebrate the birthday of Liz Dunleavy, the salon owner. Tina was wearing a new outfit from What Every Woman Wants, a figure-hugging red dress with a sequinned swirl from shoulder to waist. Her shoes were new too, a smart pair of low-heeled red patent leather pumps.
Petite blonde Tina took the underground into town from the Kelvinhall station to Buchanan Street then walked the short distance to the Starburst Bar on Sauchiehall Street where the girls were already ensconced with their drinks. Tina was drinking vodka and coke. According to Liz Dunleavy, quoted in the
Daily Record
, they had several rounds before leaving the Starburst for Bluebeard’s nightclub in a side street off George Square.
The club was packed and the dance floor was full of bodies. At first, the girls stayed together but during the course of the next couple of hours they split up and danced with various
men. Liz Dunleavy said they lost track of each other for a while. Little did they know the horror that was happening to Tina as they were dancing the night away without a care in the world. When they came back together around 2 a.m., of Tina there was no sign.
But none of them were worried. It wasn’t unknown for one or other of them to pair up with a man and either go on to another club or go home with him. So even though Tina didn’t generally behave like that, the other three didn’t think anything was amiss. They queued up for a taxi from the rank at Queen Street station and went home, thinking Tina was having a good time with someone she’d just met.
Next morning, there was a big shock in store for Sandy Simpson, the early barman at Bluebeard’s. Sandy’s first job of the day was to deal with the empties from the night before. He wheeled out the first tub from behind the bar into the lane where the club’s glass skips were situated. And there, stuffed behind one of the wheeled skips like a discarded piece of rubbish, was the battered and strangled body of poor Tina McDonald.
Strathclyde Police struggled with the case. They revealed Tina had been brutally raped, beaten about the head and manually strangled. They later admitted they had DNA evidence, but no suspects to match it against. Literally hundreds of people who had been out in the city that night came forward to be interviewed and tested, but it seemed that nobody had seen Tina with a man and all the DNA tests came back negative. The last definite sighting of her was touching up her make-up in the ladies toilet of Bluebeard’s at about one in the morning. And then it was as if she had disappeared in a puff of smoke only to reappear the next morning as a murder victim.
All these years later, still no one knows who took Tina McDonald’s life that spring evening. Nobody has paid the
price for this cruel and heartless act that caused so much grief and loss to the people who loved Tina. It remains one of the shameful Glasgow murders that has no solution.