‘Please do come in. I’m afraid it’s a little cluttered.’
That was something of an understatement, Ginny Horton thought. The accountancy practice of Norrington and Grieves occupied a couple of offices above a row of shops in Jedburgh. There was a reception and administrative office, currently occupied by a middle-aged woman who sat systematically tapping data into a computer. Behind that was a slightly larger office notionally occupied by Roger Grieves, although the majority of the available space seemed to be taken up by piles of paperwork and stacked files. If Norrington existed, he didn’t seem to be in this building.
‘Sorry it’s a bit chaotic. We’re in the middle of negotiating for some more storage space.’ He leaned over to move a heap of papers from a chair to the floor. ‘Please do take a seat. Can I get you a coffee?’
‘No, that’s fine. I won’t keep you any longer than I need to.’
Grieves took a seat behind a desk as cluttered as the rest of the office. He was a short rotund man, with a shiny bald head and a substantial greying beard. He looked as if joviality was his natural mode and he was making an effort to look sombre. ‘Take as long as you need. I want to do everything I can to help. It’s an awful business. I still can’t quite believe it.’
‘That’s really why I’m here, Mr Grieves. We’re trying to understand the circumstances; what might have led Paul Dawson to commit this kind of act.’
‘There’s no question that he did it, then? I was hoping…’ He left the sentence hanging.
‘All the evidence indicates that, I’m afraid. Can I ask for your views of Paul Dawson? What sort of man was he?’
‘I’m not sure what to say really. I only really knew him as a client, although I’d known him for a long time. More than ten years. We started working for him when he first set up his business.’
‘His business is some kind of consultancy, I understand?’
‘I’m not sure I entirely understood it myself. Paul was an occupational psychologist. His background was in human resources. Training and development, that kind of stuff. All a bit of a mystery to me. I know his background was in retail, training sales teams. He’d worked for various big companies and then for one of the large consultancies. He was offered some kind of redundancy package, and took the opportunity to go solo and set up his own consultancy practice.’
‘Successfully?’
‘Pretty much so, I think. He was basically a sole trader with a few associates helping him out as he needed them. He’d initially had ambitions to grow the business more, but in the end he’d accepted it was better kept small. He was making a decent living for himself without all the stress of trying to run a larger business.’
‘And he was happy with that? He didn’t see that as a failure?’
‘That’s what he told me. That it had been a conscious decision on his part. He’d seen people he knew trying to build consultancy businesses, the pressures of trying to sustain a sufficient flow of business, and he just thought it was too much stress. I honestly don’t know if he had any regrets.’ He shrugged. ‘He was making a more than decent living, though.’
‘He wasn’t having any financial difficulties?’
‘Not at all. The pandemic lockdown had been a bit of a challenge for him at first, as it was to a lot of people. But he’d found ways through that. He was running his workshops online, and he’d found effective ways of working remotely. If anything, he reckoned that made the work more profitable because he was still charging the same but not incurring the costs for travel and venues. Obviously, I don’t really know what his future order book looked like, but I did his quarterly VAT so saw his figures pretty regularly. The last year was probably the strongest he’d had.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘I’m trying to think. The last time I saw him face to face was probably a couple of months back. He’d called in to drop off some documents. We took the opportunity to have a chat. Nothing particularly profound. Just talking about family and holidays, and all that.’
‘What did he say about his family?’
‘The usual stuff. How the kids were doing at school. His wife, Maria, was thinking about going back to work.’
‘How did he seem about that? Her going back to work, I mean.’
‘Fine, as far as I could tell. He’d been encouraging her to do it for a while. If anything, I think he’d felt bad about the fact that she’d stopped working in the first place, but given how much he was working away at the time, I’m not sure they had much choice.’
‘How did he seem generally?’
‘No different from usual. But, as I say, this was two months ago, so I couldn’t say if he’d been the same more recently. I’ve spoken to him on the phone a few times, and he seemed fine. All this just came completely out of the blue as far as I was concerned.’
‘Did he talk about his holiday plans at all?’
‘He did, actually. They’ve generally been abroad in previous years. Places suited to the kids. They’d been delaying booking this year, hoping the pandemic situation might become clearer. In the end they decided to stay in the UK, but he’d left it late to book so they had to take what they could get.’
‘Did he say why they’d chosen the Highlands?’
‘Just somewhere to get away, I think. Somewhere remote. He’d spent time up there a few years back.’
‘I don’t suppose the names Craig or Andrea Gillan mean anything to you?’
‘I don’t think so. Should they?’
‘Possible friends of Paul Dawson?’
‘Doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid.’
‘Anything else you can tell me that you think might be relevant?’
‘I can’t think of anything. It’s been a huge shock. I can’t say I knew the family well, but from everything Paul said you’d have thought everything was pretty idyllic for them. I can’t begin to imagine what might have triggered something like this.’
‘We may never know for certain. We’re just trying to understand as much about the circumstances as possible.’
‘I don’t envy your job. It can’t be pleasant, delving into something like this.’
She offered no response to his observation. ‘Many thanks for your assistance, Mr Grieves. We’re likely to need to look more closely into Paul Dawson’s business and finances so we’ll be in touch with you about that. If anything else occurs to you in the meantime, please give me a call. I’ll leave you a card with my details.’
Back outside, she was left only with a sense of frustration. As with the previous day’s visit to the Dawsons’ house, she felt as if she’d largely been wasting her time. That was part of any investigation, of course. You couldn’t tell what might or might not be useful till you’d done it. But she was far from sure this trip south had really been justified.
That thought took her back to Brian Nightingale. If her trip had been a waste of time, his seemed doubly so. Sure, he’d shaken a few hands with the local team the previous afternoon, but he could probably have done the necessary liaison over the phone. He might have had some agenda to justify his travelling down here, but whatever it was had been lost in last night’s drunken chaos.
She paused and looked around her for moment before heading back to her car. Jedburgh looked like so many of the Border towns, a place seemingly preserved from an older, more serene age. The buildings were picturesque and well-maintained. There were quaint little independent shops and cafés, and little sign of the boarded-up shopfronts and ubiquitous charity shops that dominated so many high streets. It was a prosperous area, and she could imagine the Dawsons would have fitted in well here.
So what was it that had led Paul Dawson from here to that dreadful massacre in the Highlands? What had been going on in his head to make him do that? How did that link to what had happened to the Gillans?
She still had no answers that made any kind of sense. Grieves had perhaps given her one or two clues that could be followed up as they began to talk to the Dawsons’ neighbours and tried to identify some of their friends. But it still felt as if they were a long way from any breakthrough.
And in the meantime all she had to look forward to was the prospect of a long drive back with a very hungover Brian Nightingale.