Authors: Val McDermid
‘A wee bit more than that,’ Karen said. ‘He tried very hard to push it on to you. He didn’t know about your meeting. If you’d had your feet up in your hotel room, it might have been
kind of difficult for you to talk your way out of it. Just one thing – Abbott said you’d had me followed. Why?’
He shrugged, dismissing the question as insignificant. ‘I didn’t know who you were or what your game was. I wanted to be sure you weren’t up to something nefarious. I am targeted by all sorts of people. As we’ve both discovered this morning,’ he added, acid in his voice.
Karen slid carefully between the sheets, her assorted aches dulled by the drugs. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired. River, summoned by Jason, was in the living room with her laptop and instructions to wake Karen every two hours. ‘Good luck with that,’ Karen had said, emerging from a shower that had done the opposite of waking her up.
There were, she thought, different ways of serving justice. Sometimes it was enough to have the answer. Nobody could fault the cops on the original inquiry into Tina McDonald’s death. Even if they’d realised the underground ticket wasn’t hers, it would have taken them nowhere. The evidence that had nailed her killer simply hadn’t been available to them. Three more people had to die a horrible, stupid death before the crucial piece of evidence fell into her lap. Sure, it would have been more satisfying to put Gary Foreman behind bars. But at least Tina’s family had their answer now, and without having to relive those terrible days through the medium of a trial.
But when it came to Will Abbott, there was only one way to serve justice. And that was to put him behind bars for the rest of his life. Karen knew in her bones that he had blown up that plane. But she had to let that go. She was never going to nail that. But he would pay for taking Gabriel’s life.
So far, her best efforts had taken away his liberty. Charged with assault, attempting to pervert the course of justice, and murder. No sheriff would grant him bail. Not with the
evidence against him on the police assault. The problem was, that was only temporary. There was still a long road to travel before she could be sure a jury would convict him of at least one murder. In her heart, Karen believed the necessary proof was there, somewhere. And if anybody could find it, it was her. Justice would be served. Somehow.
Three months later
They walked
down Leith Walk in step, Karen and River keeping pace with each other in the mild early evening. Only in the past week or so had Karen felt herself walking as freely as she had before Will Abbott broke her collarbone with the business end of a power strip. She still hadn’t recovered full strength or mobility in her left shoulder, but every week, the physio got easier and the range of movement improved. What baffled her about her recuperation was that hand in hand with her physical healing had come a restoration of the possibility of sleep. She had rediscovered the ability to go to bed at a reasonable time and sleep until her alarm woke her.
She’d been so spooked by this she’d gone back to see the doctor who had given her the all-clear after her blow to the head. He’d run some tests, given her a CT scan and pronounced her well within the range of normal. ‘First time for everything,’ River had commented drily.
So she was sleeping through the night again. Oddly, she almost missed her night walks, that quartering of the streets
that had made sense of the city for her. But she had come to relish the alertness that came with long hours of good sleep. She was better-tempered too. Better able to deal with the Macaroon with equanimity.
She’d even managed a moment of compassion for Ross Garvie. Just a moment, mind. He’d eventually surfaced from his coma to the news that he’d never walk again, he’d be in nappies for the rest of his life, blind in one eye and deaf in one ear. The speech centres in his brain were permanently damaged. The next debate would be whether he was fit to stand trial for the culpable homicide of his three friends.
As they reached the bottom of Leith Walk and turned into Duke Street, Karen could wait no longer. She’d been hugging to her heart a piece of extraordinary news that had landed in her inbox moments before she’d walked out of the office to meet River. ‘Something to tell you,’ she said.
River half-turned, alerted by some note in Karen’s voice. ‘The Macaroon’s taking early retirement?’
‘Even better than that.’
‘Hard to imagine.’ River thrust her arm through Karen’s. ‘Come on, tell me.’
‘I got a message from the lab this afternoon. I don’t know why it’s taken this long, but apparently sometimes it just does. They’ve found Will Abbott’s DNA on two of the bullets in the gun that killed Gabriel.’
River stopped in her tracks, pulling Karen round to face her, forcing an elderly woman to execute a clumsy sidestep, tutting at them. ‘You’re kidding!’ she yelped.
‘No kidding.’ Karen couldn’t hold her face in check any longer. She stood grinning like a kid in a sweetie shop. ‘We’ve got him. We’ve nailed the devious slippery arrogant bastard. Ruth Wardlaw will crucify him. He’s never going to sit in his lovely Notting Hill games room playing Glengaming’s latest blockbuster again.’
River
lit up. ‘That’s great news. It’s hard to see how he can explain that away.’
Karen swung her round and carried on walking. ‘It’s the final brick in the wall. Add that to the ANPR data that confirms Frank Sinclair’s statement that they drove up to Edinburgh then Abbott travelled on alone to Kinross and back. And the jacket he was wearing? They found that when they searched his house. He’d taken it to the dry cleaner’s, so we lost any gunshot residue. But there were minute traces of Gabriel’s DNA deep in the fabric – the blowback from the wound.’
River shook her head. ‘I can’t believe he kept the jacket. You’d think these days that everybody would be forensically aware.’
‘It was bespoke Oswald Boateng.’
‘If he can afford Boateng, he can afford to bin it and buy a replacement.’
Karen chuckled. ‘I met his wife. She was outraged that we were taking the Boateng. So maybe he was more worried about his wife noticing it was missing. Anyway, most people, if they think about it at all, would imagine that dry cleaning would destroy DNA.’
‘You’ve nailed him.’
‘It’s never over till the jury has had their day in court. But yes, I think we’ve nailed him for Gabriel. It’s a shame we couldn’t make the cold case stick. But once he’s been sent down, I will be talking extensively to the media about the different angle we’ve been taking in that investigation.’
River smiled. ‘Which, technically, is ongoing.’
‘Which, technically, is ongoing,’ Karen agreed. ‘Oh, and there’s one more odd thing. Do you remember me telling you that Gabriel had supposedly been going on about some mate of his in Myanmar who was being persecuted by the government and had supposedly disappeared? There was a
letter from him in the cottage, full of paranoid ramblings that made no sense, according to somebody we tapped up in the Foreign Office. For a wee moment, we wondered if Will was going to try that as his second attempt at shifting the blame. Well, this week, a postcard turned up from his mate. Not in a government jail. Eloped with his girlfriend to another island.’
River giggled. ‘I’m glad somebody got a happy ending for once.’
They came to a halt outside a freshly painted shopfront. The signboard said,
ALEPPO – SYRIAN CAFÉ
, and beneath that, a line of Arabic script that Karen presumed repeated the same thing. The interior was crowded with people, Middle Eastern and locals, glasses in hand. Teenagers moved among them with bowls of olives and plates of meze. She took a deep breath, mentally girding her loins. ‘Come on, then. Let’s be sociable.’
They had barely crossed the threshold when Miran appeared in front of them. ‘Inspector,’ he shouted. ‘I have been waiting for you.’ He turned and ushered a woman forward. Fine features, big brown eyes and a wide smile, a small gap between her front teeth, the bump of her pregnancy preceding her. She inclined her head towards Karen. ‘This is my wife,’ Miran said. ‘This is Amena. Amena, this is the inspector. She is the reason we are here.’
Karen shook her head. ‘No, Miran. You’re the reason we’re both here.’
Before anyone could say more, the hubbub of conversation was broken into by the tinkle of metal on glass. The noise died away. Time for speeches. Someone gave a short speech in Arabic, then Tarek took over. ‘Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the new Aleppo. Now we have a place to meet, we can start to belong here. We thank everyone who helped us. We thank Inspector Pirie because she started this. And MP Grassie who help us make it happen. We thank too the city
council and all our friends who work on the café to make it good. Enjoy tonight and enjoy coming back to Aleppo many times.’ Applause, then conversation broke out again.
River squeezed her arm. ‘You did a good thing, Karen.’
‘River, they probably saved my life. What I did for them doesn’t even come close.’
‘Yeah, but you didn’t know that when you helped them make the right connections.’
Karen thought about the past year. Things lost, things found. And in the thick of it, an unimagined way forward. ‘Right enough,’ she said. ‘But this isn’t my place. Come on, let’s walk.’
Because
Karen Pirie always has one foot in the past, I need to find people with arcane bits of knowledge to help me get the details right. Thanks to everyone who chipped in, and in particular, thanks to:
Andy Preece for period bus details;
Professor Niamh Nic Daeid for explosive information and for letting me blow things up in her lab;
Professor Dame Sue Black for the Vet School suggestion;
Rachael Kelsey for Scots family law and legal standing of a dead man’s DNA;
Tom Phillips for that crucial wee detail about Fife office buildings;
Ellie MacKinnon for generosity in donating to Breast Cancer Now and the Sick Kids Friends Foundation in exchange for lending me her name;
The McCredie brothers for their totally shan help;
Pete Wishart MP for parliamentary detail;
Steve
Bruce from the General Register Office for making sure I got the adoption details right.
I have a team of hard-working and committed people whose support makes my life so much easier. My perceptive and demanding editors David Shelley and Lucy Malagoni at Little, Brown and Amy Hundley at Grove Atlantic; copy editor Anne O’Brien who knows how many days there are in the week; publicist Jo Wickham who knows where I should be on every one of those days; the rest of the design, sales and marketing teams who help to get my books out there and into the hands of readers; and the booksellers and librarians who have generously supported every one of my 30 novels with enthusiasm and persistence.
Finally, my staunch friends and family, particularly my bidie-in Jo and my son Cameron, who treat my addiction to words with compassion, pity and humour.