The return journey along the beach was more sedate. She had tested him. He had responded and had triumphed. They were both competitors but he had the edge – just. It was good to understand the position.
They spoke almost continually – mainly small talk about the awkwardness of her shifts, his return to his home town, their shared need to exercise.
It was Petra who raised the subject McBride had been struggling to introduce. ‘I meant to ask what was it you wanted from Dad?’ she said, as though she had been contemplating the question for some time. ‘He said it had something to do with the murder of Alison Brown, one of the chapters in your book. Congratulations, by the way, the book was excellent. Couldn’t pick any holes in it – well, not many.’
McBride nodded his thanks but said nothing about his literary achievement. He did not want to move away from the subject that had prompted his furtive activities with the binoculars for the last two mornings. He slowed his pace, anxious that nothing like rapid breathing should inhibit their conversation. He gulped a mouthful of air.
‘OK, I’ll give it to you with both barrels. I think you lot screwed up. I think you banged up the wrong bloke and Alison Brown’s real killer is still out there. That’s all – nothing too serious.’
McBride turned to look into the face of his running mate. She did not return his gaze but continued to fix her eyes ahead of her.
Finally she spoke. ‘Proof?’ she replied simply. ‘Where’s your proof?’ Now she looked back at him. ‘Anybody can make these kind of remarks about any case. Show me the money. How do you know these things?’
McBride had waited for her to say that. He wished he had been better prepared to provide the right kind of answer. ‘If I had proof, he wouldn’t still be banged up – just call it intuition.’ He braced himself for the expected response.
She did not disappoint him. ‘Intuition?’ She practically spat the word. ‘Oh, that’s good. Intuition. Just pop through to the Court of Appeal and tell them that. They’ll set Bryan Gilzean free the same day.’ She stopped in her tracks, forcing him to do the same. She faced him, the warm brown eyes suddenly chilly. ‘You’re going to have to do better, Campbell – a lot better. You’re accusing several police officers of lying or being totally incompetent. Either way, you’re going to have to come up with something better than some kind of journalist’s hunch.’
McBride dropped down on to the sand beside a low dune and leaned back. He patted a soft area beside him, inviting Petra to join him. She sat next to him but there was no kind of relaxation in her posture. She held her knees below her chin. The body language said defensive.
McBride attempted to soothe her. ‘Every wrongly convicted man has had to battle to find good enough proof to walk free. It’s never easy but you have to start somewhere,’ he said, in an effort to be placatory. ‘What about this? If we accept the scenario that Bryan Gilzean visits his girlfriend, they have a drink and sex, in whatever order, then they argue and he strangles her.’
Petra nodded, cautious in her agreement.
‘Three things,’ McBride continued. ‘They all seemed to have only consumed one glass of wine each. Fine, except Gilzean doesn’t like white wine. If he’d wanted something to drink, it would have been a beer. Since he practically lived there, there would probably be some in the house. Next – why was Alison Brown wearing one of her best dresses and still in high-heeled shoes when she was found dead? Why dress up for your long-term boyfriend unless you were going out somewhere, which they weren’t? And why was she in high heels in her own flat? She would have kicked them off the minute she sat on her sofa … if she’d ever worn them in the first place when all she was expecting was him. Would you still be trotting about in high heels for any regular boyfriend of yours? It’s just not what you do, is it? You get comfortable in your own home, unless you’re expecting somebody special, that is. At the very least, they would have been taken off or come off if they were having a bit of rumpy pumpy. Don’t tell me she would have put them back on afterwards.’
He had DI Novak’s full, if grudging, attention. She said nothing for a few moments, then asked, ‘OK, my three things. How do you explain the presence of his semen? What about his fingerprints on the wine glass? And how did his hair get on the tie used to kill her? Basic stuff, really, and that’s before we even start on the fact there was absolutely no sign of any other man having been in the flat.’
McBride had anticipated the questions but it did not make answering them any easier. He replied slowly, tentatively. ‘Don’t know. He says he hadn’t seen her for three days and that’s when they’d last had sex. Maybe some of the semen stayed in place?’
She gave him a disbelieving look. ‘You can’t even convince yourself of that, can you?’
Ignoring her truth, he moved on but he still felt sheepish doing so. ‘His fingerprints on the wine glass – that’s no big deal. He said he’d never seen the glass before but who remembers wine glasses? He was just about a lodger in the flat for spells. Of course he would have handled some of the glassware. Same with the hair on the tie – that could have been picked up off a sofa or something.’
McBride did not need another derisive look from Petra to make him aware of the weakness of his case. ‘All right, maybe it isn’t the strongest defence you’ll ever hear. If it was, the jury wouldn’t have convicted him. You convince me he’s guilty.’
‘Don’t have to. The law says he is and everyone, except you and his father, thinks so too.’
He changed the subject. ‘Did you work on the case at all?’
Petra shook her head. ‘Not in any way,’ she said. ‘I was still a uniformed sergeant behind a desk at headquarters. Besides, it was all signed, sealed and delivered in no time. There was no need to rope in the uniforms to do any donkey work like knocking on doors and crawling about looking for witnesses.’
McBride hesitated, wondering how he would phrase his next question. Put the wrong way, she would back off faster than a retreating Italian army. ‘Look, just to satisfy me, can you do me a small favour?’
Her eyes, filled with reluctance, widened, but she said nothing.
‘Can you find out about the beer? If there was any. And can you get more information on the tie? Was it a young man’s style or what? And, if there’s any chance, whether the wine was cheap plonk or something better? Oh, and can you tell me what sort of music she might have been playing that night?’ He waited for her reaction, wondering if she would come over all official.
She took so long to reply that McBride was on the point of rephrasing his request.
‘If you’re asking me to reopen the case, forget it,’ she said bluntly. ‘I’ve just made DI and that’s the kind of trick that would put me back on the beat in the housing estates. Nobody likes a smart-ass trying to prove how clever they are, especially when it’s an accelerated promotion female. There are at least half a dozen tossers just waiting for me to do something like that. But, because you were good to me when I was a daft schoolgirl in London – and because you have a nice bum when you run – I’ll make a couple of enquiries. Tell anyone what I’ve done and I’ll hack your balls off with a blunt knife.’
She rose from the sand and bent over in front of him, reaching down to touch her toes. As she slid her fingertips down the endless legs her sweatshirt rode up, revealing an expanse of soft, unblemished flesh. She stopped stretching as unexpectedly as she had begun and looked at him with the kind of smile that made him think she had read his mind. Then she started to run away from him. Her last words over her shoulder before she crossed the beach and on to the track back to Monifieth were, ’By the way, the bit about your bum – that’s why I let you stay in front of me on the race to the castle.’