Authors: Val McDermid
They worked on through the arrival of strong bitter coffee and stale muffins, absently eating and drinking. ‘Don’t get crumbs on the keyboards,’ Noble complained. Jason gave him a hard blank stare and carried on eating.
A couple of hours passed slowly in the tedious consumption
of other people’s work; little of it possessed of any interest to them. Karen’s head had begun to hurt, a dull ache behind her eyes. ‘Do you know what they gave me?’ she asked Jason.
He shook his head. ‘No idea.’
‘Or when?’
He shrugged. ‘Probably about five hours ago?’
Karen popped two pills from the blister pack the reluctant doctor had given her and swallowed it with the rancid dregs of her coffee. She sighed and returned to her examination of the crime scene reports.
A couple of minutes later, Jason cleared his throat. She looked up. ‘Something?’
He nodded. She got up and moved behind him to read the screen. Noble jumped up and joined her. It was a witness statement. Douglas McCloskey had been taking his dog for a bedtime walk in Kirkgate Park. He knew Gabriel Abbott by sight; they both drank in the same pub. He’d seen Abbott walking down Kirkgate towards the Loch Level Trail path.
Then a man came from the opposite direction, from the path itself. And he walked up to Gabriel. I could see him quite well because they were under a street light. They knew each other all right, because they did one of those handshakes with half a hug. They spoke for a wee minute then they walked back together to the path. I didn’t see if they actually went down the path, because I’d turned round to go back by then. The man who met Gabriel was a stranger to me but I think I would know him if I saw him again. He was a couple of inches taller than Gabriel, quite lean and wiry. Maybe a few years older. He was wearing a suit jacket and jeans and a dark T-shirt. A younger man’s clothes, I would say.
Karen
looked at Noble. ‘You haven’t put this description out,’ she said flatly.
He looked pained. ‘It’s not much of a description, is it? It could be half the blokes in a Kinross pub.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Have you had him in to do an E-FIT?’
‘I didn’t see the point. Those things never look like the real thing. And eye-witness testimony, it’s notoriously unreliable.’
‘Jesus,’ Karen said. ‘Have you got any other witness statements like this?’
Noble shook head. ‘Nothing. It’s an uncorroborated sighting in the dark, for fuck’s sake.’
‘For fuck’s sake,
ma’am
, Inspector.’ Karen sighed. ‘You’ve got an unidentified stranger walking towards the locus where the body turned up and you didn’t think that was indicative of something other than suicide? Christ.’ She turned away in disgust. ‘Print that out, Jason. And you’re sure there’s nothing else remotely similar? Nobody seen walking around Kinross with a gun or anything?’
‘Obviously not. Look, there was no indication of anything other than a chance encounter between people who knew each other. It’s not like we had a suspect to put in a line-up. We thought, it’s just an old guy in his seventies walking his dog, trying to make himself look important.’
Jason collected the statement from the printer. ‘We’re out of here,’ Karen said. ‘But there’s every chance we’ll be back. So make sure all your paperwork’s in good order and there’s no more unexploded bombs in there.’
She headed for the door, willing herself to put one foot in front of the other without stumbling. Was this concussion, that sense of being light-headed and heavy at the same time? Once they were clear of the police station, Karen gave Jason his instructions. ‘Let’s get back to Edinburgh. I want you to put together a six-pack including Will Abbott and send someone from Fife to
pick up Douglas McCloskey and bring him to Gayfield Square. It’s got to be an officer from outwith the inquiry that does the ID from the six-pack, but there’s plenty of bodies around the place that we can rope in. Let’s get this thing moving.’
‘And what about you, boss? You need to rest.’
‘I’m OK, really. My head’s still working, which is the main thing. But you need to tell me if I’m going off the air, OK?’ Jason met this with a troubled look. ‘I know, I know. How will you tell?’ She smiled. Even the muscles of her face felt weary. ‘Let’s get this done before some smart-arse from Health and Safety decides to send me home.’
T
hey
were met at Gayfield Square with a degree of contained panic. Four men in custody, one lawyered up, three whose first language wasn’t English, and no statement from the victim that might clear up who were the heroes and who the villains. Karen sat down with a sergeant from CID she’d drafted in before when she’d needed an extra body. He was good in the interview room; he’d done the courses and he’d actually assimilated what he’d been told.
She repeated what she’d told Jason – that, as far as she was concerned, the Syrians were her friends and Will Abbott was a potential suspect in five murders. ‘I don’t have much recall of the attack itself. But I think I scratched my attacker’s face.’ She held up her right hand. ‘Jason took scrapings at the hospital. Witnessed by a nurse.’
‘That’s helpful. He’s got a scratch on his face. He was accusing the Syrians, but if you’ve got his DNA under your nails, that blows him out.’
‘I’m told there might be a weapon on the embankment?’
The sergeant grinned. ‘We had a team out at first light. It appears that what you were battered with was a heavy-duty
power strip with a surge protector. Much more likely to be the weapon of choice of a software millionaire than a trio of Syrian refugees, if you ask me. It’s away to the lab now for DNA and prints.’
‘So what are you waiting for?’
He grinned and went off to the interview room. Karen took herself off to the observation room where there was an audiovisual feed from the interview. Nothing else to be done while Jason was organising a photo ID parade, unless she snuck back to her office for a nap. How long did you have to wait after a head injury before you were actually allowed to go to sleep unsupervised?
Will Abbott and his lawyer were facing the camera. Abbott leaned back in the chair, all nonchalance and confidence. He had his mother’s good looks, sharp symmetrical features and thick head of honey-coloured hair. He was, she thought, distinctive. With luck, Douglas McCloskey would pick him out of a line-up.
Abbott’s solicitor, a well-known face called Cameron Campbell, read out a prepared statement. ‘My client was spending the night in Edinburgh prior to meetings with business associates tomorrow. He decided to go for a walk to clear his head before bed and chose the Restalrig Railway Path. He had been walking for a short time when he came upon a woman being attacked by three men of Middle Eastern appearance. He tried to fight them off but he too was overcome. The police arrived before matters escalated into something more serious. He will be making no further comment on the occurrence.’
The sergeant leaned back in his chair, mirroring Abbott’s body language. He chuckled. ‘Really? Mr Campbell, you know as well as I do that your client’s statement has got more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire. It begs so many questions it should be sitting on Princes Street with a dog on a string
and a cardboard cup in front of it.’ He shifted to a more upright position. ‘Mr Abbott, are you booked into a hotel in Edinburgh?’
‘No comment.’ Abbott’s voice was more reedy than she expected.
‘Where is your car parked?’
‘No comment.’
‘Why were you stalking DCI Karen Pirie? Was it to do with her Historic Cases Unit investigation into your mother’s murder?’
He blinked half a dozen times but said, ‘No comment,’ without flinching.
And so it continued. Abbott was good at this. But if he was as narcissistic as she thought, he would pride himself on being able to outwit them. She was about to give up and go in search of a decent cup of coffee when Jason stuck his head round the door. ‘Result, boss. Douglas McCloskey picked Will Abbott without any hesitation. We’ve got it all on video. Do you want to come and have a wee word with him?’
Douglas McCloskey was a sprightly seventy-two-year-old with loose, lined skin that reminded Karen of a Shar Pei. His blue eyes were sharp enough, though. He’d brought his dog with him, a grumpy-looking terrier who sat on his lap. McCloskey stroked the dog’s ears compulsively, which Karen thought might explain the dog’s bad mood. ‘That was very interesting,’ he said as soon as they’d introduced themselves. ‘I was worried I might not be as good a witness as I thought, but as soon as I saw those photos, I knew that was the man I’d seen with poor Gabriel.’
‘You did very well, Mr McCloskey,’ Karen reassured him. ‘I’ve seen the statement you gave to my colleagues. Do you know what time it was when you saw this encounter?’
‘It would have been about quarter past ten. I’d been watching a repeat of
Scott and Bailey
and when that finished at ten,
Roxy and I went out. It takes me about fifteen minutes to get to the place where I turn around, and that’s where I saw them.’
‘And was there anything that struck you about their meeting?’
‘I thought Gabriel seemed a bit taken aback. Hard to be sure, I know, but he looked a wee bit startled. But they greeted each other very friendly.’ He fondled the dog’s soft ears. ‘There was certainly nothing antagonistic about it, which is why I thought it was probably nothing to do with poor Gabriel’s death. The bench he was found on was quite a step away from the start of the path, and the other man didn’t look like he was dressed for walking. Town shoes, you know?’
‘But you didn’t see him come back into town?’
‘Well, no, but I wouldn’t have. I had my back to the path, walking home. I don’t go about spying on my neighbours.’ He sounded mildly offended.
‘I know, Mr McCloskey. But even though I’ve been a police officer a long time, I still hold out for the lucky break.’
He chuckled and pointed to her sling. ‘Looks like you got an unlucky break there.’
She sighed. ‘You could say that. Thanks, Mr McCloskey. We’ll get an officer to drive you back home.’
‘The neighbours will be thinking I’ve been breaking the law.’
‘I hope not. We’ll be in touch.’
In the lull while they waited for someone from the fiscal’s office to come round and make legal sense of what they had, Karen hid in her office and called Colin Semple. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said,’ she began. ‘And I think you’re right. But I was discussing it with a colleague and she pointed out that I was trying to run before I could walk.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘In order to identify the donor DNA in the recipients’ blood, the medics have to know what they’re looking for. So before they do the transplants, they take samples of the donor DNA for later comparison. That DNA will be on the record—’
‘And Gary Foreman, being dead, has no human rights.’ Semple had caught on faster than she had. ‘And the hospital owes him no duty of confidentiality.’ He groaned. ‘We’ve both been rather stupid, Chief Inspector. Overcomplicating things. Thank goodness for your clever colleague. I shall get on to it first thing on Monday morning and, with a following wind, we should have a conclusive answer very soon. Well done.’
‘Not really. Thank you for making me stop and think about what I was doing. Sometimes I get so focused on the prize, I forget the human dimension.’
‘We all do, Chief Inspector. We all do.’
Karen put the phone down and allowed herself a moment of pleasure at reaching this point in the case. It would be closed, and closed soon. In a sense, justice had been thwarted because Gary Foreman had never passed a night in jail for the murder of Tina McDonald. But he’d had to live with it every day, and she suspected he’d known his own torments. The main thing was that the people who loved Tina would finally know the truth. No more moving through the city where they lived, wondering whether the man they’d passed on the street, stood next to in a bar, sat beside on the underground was the one who had killed their Tina. No more fearing they could somehow have prevented her death.
Karen built a picture of that night in her head. Tina, dressed up to the nines, on the bus. Did she know Foreman from her regular trips on the number 16? Had they grown pally over time? Had he thought there was more to her open, friendly manner than there was? Or did some trip switch in
his brain flick on that night for reasons that were nothing to do with Tina?
Either she’d told him her plans for the evening or he’d overheard her telling someone else. And he’d come off his shift determined to make her his that night. He’d taken the underground back into town and picked up Tina’s trail at some point. Maybe asked her to dance. Maybe suggested they go on somewhere else. And then something went badly wrong. Was he too insistent? Did she have second thoughts? Did she sense something off about him?
Whatever the reason, Gary Foreman turned savage. And what had started as a fun night out ended in fear and pain and death.
Karen heaved a sigh. It was a horrible story, but at least now it was one with an ending. One more case closed. But another lay in wait, one that was far less tractable. It was a never-ending task. She remembered a poem they’d done at school, a poet called Robert Garioch with a Scots version of the myth of Sisyphus. ‘Bumpity doun in the corrie gaed whuddran the pitiless whun stane / Sisyphus dodderan eftir it, shair of his cheque at the month’s end.’ Sometimes that was exactly what life in the HCU felt like.
T
he
Fiscal Depute was unfamiliar to Karen, who had hoped for someone she’d worked with before. Someone who knew what she’d achieved and how she worked. Someone who might cut her a wee bit of slack. The fiscal’s job was to work with the police to discuss whether there was enough evidence to bring charges and to direct the investigation where more was needed. Karen thought a good fiscal required a dash of imagination and a core of trust for the best results. Those were not always qualities found among lawyers, in her experience.
What she knew about Ruth Wardlaw: she hadn’t been in the Edinburgh office for long. Now in her early thirties, she’d cut her teeth in the Highlands where, frankly, there wasn’t an overwhelming amount of serious major crime. Murder was thin on the ground, as was armed robbery. But Karen acknowledged that they did have their share of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll up there; it wasn’t the lovely idyll that Sunday-night TV drama projected. So Karen hoped the new FD was adept, experienced and adroit enough to take a chance on her case against Will Abbott.