Everything in Dennis MacMillan’s house was pale green. His wife, Maria, had returned from Swindon to look after him, so she took them through the house. Dennis was reclined on a sunbed in the back garden, reading a book about faith in the twenty-first century, a straw hat on his head to cover a sterile dressing.
They made their introductions, chairs were gathered, and Maria went off to put the kettle on.
‘You look better than the last time I saw you,’ said Costello, slipping off her jacket.
‘I feel much better. It’s just when I get up to do something, I get a bit woozy.’
Costello sat down. ‘We’d like to know more about the last time you spoke to Mr Pearcey.’
‘That was two days before he passed away. I got his shopping, I let Norma out. He was a bit down, which was unusual for him.’
‘Did he say why?’
‘He had read in the paper that a friend of his had passed away. It upset him that he couldn’t go to the funeral and pay his respects.’ MacMillan nodded at this point, recognizing how troubled a man of Pearcey’s age would be by this.
‘Did he say whose funeral it was?’
‘Yes, but I can’t remember. Maria, can you check my jacket pocket? Is that order of service still there, or on the mantelpiece?’
‘So that was the funeral you had been at?’
MacMillan nodded. ‘I only went to get him an order of service. There was no chance of me getting in, but they had a waiting area outside, with a TV screen, so I stayed.’
‘Whose funeral was it?’
Maria came trotting back and handed over the small white folder with its black border to Costello.
‘Here we are. Lambert McSween – they called him Dougie.’
‘The cheerful peacock,’ Costello said.
‘Yes, that’s right, there was the most beautiful floral peacock on the coffin. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
‘I saw this at the hospital but didn’t make the connection. I don’t know how I missed it. If I had seen this …’
‘The daft name,’ interrupted Anderson. ‘He’s not called Lambert in any of the documentation.’
The picture on the back page was unremarkable: an old man sitting in his garden. Inside were the usual hymns, prayers and some music she noted with a smile – ‘Petite Fleur’ and ‘Just Walking in the Rain’. The inside picture was a black-and-white photograph of three young men, the picture taken from the floor, the young men sliding, arms wide, all in neat shiny suits, slim ties, very clean shoes with pointy toes.
The Peacocks. Three men live to be eighty plus. Two of them are dead within a fortnight. As the casual chatter went on between Anderson and the MacMillans, she wondered about the third one and how difficult he was to find. ‘Did anybody refer back to their dancing days?’
‘Oh, yes, the Peacocks. There were a few stories going round afterwards – you know, with the tea and coffee.’
‘So you went to the purvey?’
‘Yes, it was in some hotel, I don’t know. Catherine knew where it was.’
‘Who’s Catherine?’
He shrugged. ‘She drove me to the hotel from the crematorium.’
Costello tried not to look at Anderson. She asked calmly, ‘Did anybody show any extra interest in Eddie Dukes, or Jimmy Pearcey as you would have known him?’
‘Oh, Eddie, yes, a few stories about him – you know the way these things go.’
Anderson prompted. ‘So the woman who drove you to the hotel?’
‘Oh, it was fine, we both had masks and gel, gloves.’
‘Did she drive you back to the train station?’
‘No, she drove me home. She said it might be safer driving rather than come back on the train. It was rush hour by then.’
‘Back to Invernock?’
‘Yes, she lived up in Greenock, I think she said.’
‘Did she ask where you lived? Did she say anything about Jimmy, or how far you had to walk?’
MacMillan thought for a moment. ‘She asked about the hill.’
‘The hill?’
‘Yes. I said I had to walk up the hill, and she said it wasn’t much of a hill. She lived right at the top at Greenock.’
Anderson looked up at the brae. ‘It’s a fair hike. I walked it. It had me puffing.’
‘Catherine thought I meant the hill up to that bungalow there,’ he gestured towards the Lyonns’ house. ‘But I meant that one up there. It might not look such a big hill, but you should try it when the wind is in your face.’
So she knew. ‘Did you get her name?’
‘Catherine.’
‘But Catherine who? Did you get a surname?’
He shook his head.
‘What did she look like?’
‘Small, dark.’
‘What time would this be?’
‘Six, maybe. Half six, I think.’
‘Mr MacMillan, please think carefully. Did you ever say that you were looking after James Pearcey?’
‘No.’ His face changed as he joined the dots. ‘Well, somebody did say something and I said that Mr Pearcey could be related to one of the men in the picture, that there was a likeness. That gentleman there.’ He pointed to Eddie in the photograph. ‘Don’t you think there is a likeness?’
Anderson took a deep breath quietly. ‘Can you tell me more about Catherine?’
Colin Anderson had been drinking a cup of very good coffee after a dinner of fish and chips, enjoying it all the more because of the peace and quiet. He was now nibbling Doritos he had found in the cupboard, and making mental notes, wondering how a man as unobservant as Dennis MacMillan had ever got through life. Costello had made a point, though – a valid one from his own experience. MacMillan would have noticed the hair, the hat, the jacket, the accent, the glasses, the eyebrows. And these days they were all easily altered within five minutes or so.
He was still considering who Catherine might be when the call came through on the laptop: Claire and an almost unrecognizable Paige up in Tyndrum sitting at an outdoor café, drinking something that looked cool and pale – unlike both of them who looked very hot and red.
They both started waving like crazy when they came on the screen. He could see the top of Claire’s head, the right half of Paige’s, her head covered in a green bush hat.
They looked too happy, and he was glad to admit, in a pathetic little way, that he was very pleased to see that they looked happy to see him. Paige specifically was thrilled to be there, forgetting to be cool, enjoying herself. It was good to see. They were out on their own.
They were both leaning forward, adjusting something, but they could obviously see him. When he waved to them, they waved and smiled back. He could see Claire brush away a tear from her eye, and he could feel himself starting to well up. Christ, she was fifty miles away. It felt like half a world. He picked up Moses, placing him on his knee, so Claire could see her wee brother. There was more excited waving. Moses recognized her and started pointing.
Claire’s mouth was moving, her eyes shifting to the side. She didn’t appear to be talking to her dad or into the microphone. Paige disappeared away from the side of the screen, to be replaced by a notepad with the words How r u? written on it, in thick marker pen – Paige’s childish handwriting, big balloon letters, not joined up. He repositioned with a thumbs-up, then gestured driving with his hands. The laptop was lifted to show Brenda’s Focus parked beside a lodge, in one piece.
The laptop returned to the two laughing girls, then Claire nudged Paige, who giggled a wee bit more and turned her back to the screen, pulling down the strap of her top, showing the red border of her suntan against the pale china-white of her natural pallor. Claire put her forefinger against the burned skin and pulled it away, indicating that it was too hot to touch.
Colin wagged his finger, reprimanding them for not applying all that expensive, waterproof, high-factor sunscreen they had used all their Boots points on when the Malawi trip had still been possible.
There was another conversation off the side of the screen; another white bit of paper appeared at the bottom: 2morrow 8pm? Mum?
Anderson gave them the thumbs-up, and the screen swung away to give a brief glimpse of a bar behind them, a group of youngsters all the same age as Claire and Paige, all drinking, a large collection of motorbikes against the majesty of Ben Lui. The screen went black and he was left looking at the work emails he had been working through before the chips were ready.
Anderson pulled out a blank sheet of white paper, an old trick of the boss’s that helped clear a confused head in a complicated case: a blank page and a sharp pencil. With a rubber. The muddle in the middle, that nasty bit in the investigation where it becomes a fog too dense to see through. So much information comes in from different angles that the victim gets lost. Anderson had no sight of where this was going. Indeed, he had a sneaking suspicion that Costello might be right. The paedophile story looked as if it was dead in the water, but there was something else swimming around.
Dennis’s Catherine was added to the mix; there was no doubt in his mind that she had clocked Dennis, and had clocked who James Pearcey actually was. But who was Catherine? Costello had been scathing of Dennis’s description. Catherine wore a mask that she did not remove, she wore gloves, she had brown hair, thick eyebrows, small glasses, well spoken, Glasgow accent – slightly posh, he thought. The build could be either Anne or Loretta. Mulholland was checking their whereabouts.
He had read the reports of Loretta and Brian McSween, the half-sibling and sibling of Andy, the boy who had vanished, probably fallen in water as his body had never been recovered. The reports were in the review of Artie Kelly. They had both told their stories, full of anger that such accusations had been targeted at their father in the previous review. That was understandable, but it didn’t mean that their dad, Dougie, wasn’t involved; it just meant that he had kept it from his kids. Yet there was no real physical evidence. There hardly ever was in historic abuse cases, and in child abuse cases even less so. The accused were already fading and passing away. By necessity, there would have been a closed shop of those in the know, and anybody with the inclination to speak out would have done so then, not waited until now. Maybe Loretta, looking back with an adult’s eye, had hit the nail on the head. There had been a dangerous sexual predator around Invernock, but it was nothing to do with them. Unless, Anderson thought, he was about to be subject to some death-bed confession. Or somebody taking the last chance to get revenge on a mortal enemy by blackening their name with unfounded speculation, the kind that can never be refuted. Love withers quickly, but hatred can hold its breath for a very long time.
Time would catch up with the accused. Maybe it had. The best way to interview some of those involved – the accused, the witnesses and the victims – would be by utilizing the services of a medium.
He poured himself more coffee out the pot and picked up his iPad to see the file with the original crime scene photographs. Twenty-first of June 1978. The kitchen of a suburban detached house, a hot day. It was forty-two years ago. The colour on the photographs would have suffered from chemical deterioration, but these had been transferred to electronic copy, which in itself was a little odd. The case had been solved. Had Warburton, or somebody higher up in the chain of command at Police Scotland, expected it to boomerang back and drift round to the cold case squad?
Marilyn ‘Birdie’ Scanlon’s murder was not unsolved. Eddie Dukes had served his time. Here was Birdie, lying on her lino, surrounded by a pool of her own blood, shoe prints in the crimson red. He opened up the image on the screen, pulling it around, looking at different parts of the room as if he were there in person, poking around a kitchen that could have been his gran’s. He saw nothing other than what was obvious: the terrible fatal knife wound to her stomach, the burns to her face, her short black hair wet and curled around the burned flesh. Her right arm was folded over her stomach, her left was bent at the elbow, the back of her hand almost covering her face. It was a fitted kitchen, blue and white, a chopping board lying out, knife neatly across it. The cooker had an eye-level grill; a knife and two spoons sat to the left of the gas rings; one pan remained, had twisted out from over the rings. The other sat at the bottom of the facing wall, having spilled its contents over the cooker, the floor and the victim’s face.
He swiped on through the later photographs. For some reason, they were of much poorer quality, mostly black and white, the odd version of the same photograph in both colour and monochrome.
Then he looked more closely.
It had been a hot day in a hot week. The summer of 1976 was one of the hottest on record, but 1978 wasn’t so bad. In those days, the climate still afforded three months of summer, where the kids went outside playing until it got dark. Most of the witnesses who had been interviewed had mentioned the heatwave in their statements: stifling, oppressive. There was a hosepipe ban, and they had been nipping out to water the tomatoes when the neighbours weren’t looking. It was so humid; a downpour was expected to clear the air, and the rain had started just as the soul of Birdie left her mortal remains. There was something about that that made Anderson shiver. Not that it had rained, but the fact that people had mentioned it and associated the rain with the death of this lovely young woman, as if she took the sun with her when she passed away.
Anderson glanced through the observation part of the post-mortem report. The usual stuff: The body is that of a well-nourished female Caucasian and so on. Anderson skim-read it as he had done with a hundred of these. This was the pathologist’s turn to state the bloody obvious. Then a line caught Anderson’s eye. The victim had recently been exposed to sunshine, probably while wearing a bikini.
Anderson read that again.
Birdie with the porcelain skin? Was Birdie the kind of woman who would sunbathe in a bikini in the back garden? The weather was hot, so she might have sat out just one Saturday or Sunday. Sitting in the garden with a bikini, a gin and tonic in hand – maybe a Babycham in those days.
It was odd, though. He expanded the picture on the screen, looking at the tan line low on her anterior abdominal wall, another band of white across her chest and up round to the back of her neck as if she had been wearing a halter-neck bikini.
He scanned down, the image a little grainy, to another white band round her left wrist. She habitually wore a watch – a rare sight today.
Then he looked at the hands. Not delicate little hands he might have thought would belong to a woman like Birdie. It was there in her nickname, in those delicate features, her Deborah Harry eyes, that little rosebud mouth. He looked again and then looked at his own left hand, his wedding band. It had been on and off a few times in his married life, and although he avoided the sun – with his fair hair and light-blue eyes, he had always thought he was a strong contender for skin cancer – he could still clearly see a band of lighter skin under the gold.
Birdie was happily married; she’d never take that band off. It meant a lot more in 1978 than it did now. He was sure he’d read that there was a wedding ring in the personal effects removed from the body – he had recognized Scanlon’s signature when he had collected it. He made a mental note to check it again.
Then he looked back at the crime scene pictures. It might have been the colour of the original photograph, but he was sure the deceased wasn’t wearing nail varnish. Somebody – Loretta or Anne – had said she always wore nail varnish. Had they removed it at the post-mortem? Surely it was a shadow on the picture. Four shadows, one over each visible nail.
And what had Costello said about the attack on the face, the distribution of the injuries? Either a huge passion or a huge hatred? Or was it a lot simpler than that? Had somebody simply wanted to obfuscate the identity of the body.
How backward was it in 1978? They had bloods – groups if not DNA. They had matching fingerprints. They had a pathologist who was the best friend of the detective husband of the deceased, but even then … There were processes and protocols in place then, just as now.
It didn’t make sense.
The idea formulating in his mind was too bizarre to contemplate. But that did not mean it was wrong, so he followed his train of thought, walking through to the kitchen, his coffee in one hand, the iPad in the other, Norma trotting behind him.
He realized that Helena’s designer kitchen in black-and-white marble was the same layout as Birdie’s had been. Birdie’s was smaller, of course, without the island, but the triangle of the door to outside, the door to the hall and the cooker had similar positions and similar proportions. He stood up the iPad so he could look at it, as he put a pot on the stove, an Aga in his case, and stood sideways on to the back door, mirroring the photographs. In Birdie’s case, that had been a very short distance. They were both three-doored kitchens. Costello had been right: you didn’t suddenly boil a pan in order to throw it over somebody. What had it said in the report? Veronica, who was eight at the time, had said that her mum was upset. Her main evidence for this was that they had been sent out to play when a visitor was coming and they had made cake.
Had she sent the kids outside for a reason? A lover? Was there a confrontation? Dukes showed up, they argued? Birdie ended up getting her face full of boiling fat and a stab wound in the stomach, the wound being fatal as the blade had moved upwards into the chest cavity. Eddie Dukes was tall, Birdie was small. He would have needed to bend down, lowering himself to get the tip of the blade to travel in an upward direction. Why did he just not stick it in her chest the way any normal killer would? This didn’t fit. Eddie Dukes, by all accounts, had been a good bloke, faithful to his friends. Birdie might have turned to him in times of trouble. She had called Eddie on the phone on the day she died – the day somebody died, Anderson corrected himself – asking him to come over. At that time, they lived only a few streets apart. There was a report, from a neighbour, who said she heard Birdie in the garden telling Veronica to go outside and play, and not come back into the house until she was told. It had been a very warm day, and Veronica remembered the back door of the house being closed, whereas her mum always left it open to keep an eye on the children. Veronica’s statement had backed up what Eddie had said. She had wanted to go back into the house to see her mother, sensing her mother’s distress about something. Just a wee kid worried about her mum.
He looked at the crime scene photo again, then his own kitchen – the cooker, the utensils in a rack on the right. In the photographs, they were on the left of the cooker. He swiped back and back, to the picture of them dancing. She wore her watch on her right wrist. Was Birdie Scanlon left-handed?
Anderson took another sip of coffee, screwing his eyes closed. The blank sheet of paper was still staring at him, waiting for his inspiration.
It smelled of a cover-up. But the only person who could have engineered the cover-up was Birdie’s husband, Frankie Scanlon, and he was nowhere near the crime scene at the time. So that didn’t make any sense either. Or did it?
He reached for the sheet of paper. He had two avenues of investigation now. If this dead body was not Birdie, then where was she? And who was this young woman, the unmarried sun-worshipper lying on the slab?
And was Frankie Scanlon of the City of Glasgow Police complicit in that cover-up?
That would explain why everybody was so hard to track down.
Eddie was the bright academic one. Did that make him the problem solver? For a murder so brutal, he had served very little time. Most of it in a soft environment where he had taught other inmates, encouraged them to read, aided their literacy. Birdie and Eddie trusted each other implicitly. They were close friends, like brother and sister. She would have reached out to Eddie.
That’s why Eddie Dukes denied killing Birdie Summer. He hadn’t.
By eleven o’clock, the scenario was driving Anderson mad. He lifted his mobile and spoke. There was silence down the phone. Costello was very quiet. He could almost hear the machinations of her brain. He realized that he had spouted out all his suspicions in a single minute, but she had not laughed. She had not dismissed it.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Why did nobody notice?’
‘I think it was a slam-dunk that the body was Birdie. Can you recall who did the original PM?’
‘It was Williams, Doctor Williams – do you know him?’
‘Was he a bit of a drinker? What’s the phrase – not so good in the afternoon? A bit unreliable? Retire early on health grounds? That’s normally a bit of a giveaway.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Doing what?’
‘We are not investigating the death of Birdie. We are investigating the murder of Eddie Dukes and its links to an accusation of historical child abuse, but you are talking as if the murder of Birdie Summer wasn’t what it appeared to be.’
‘Are you saying that I am derailed from my professional duty? If I am right, there’s somebody in a hole in the ground and nobody has noticed.’
‘No, I am just interested in your motives. Is it because he died before he could put it right? He had plenty of time to do so, and he didn’t. Or is it because he died a sad and lonely old goat?’
‘Better to be mourned as a murderer than suspected as a paedophile. And we need to prod a bit harder into this. There is a real victim here, who’s not Birdie. Dukes spoke about her in the present tense on the tape, years after he pleaded guilty to killing her.
‘Habit? Or because he knew Birdie was still alive?’
There was a long silence. ‘I am going to call Warburton right now. He did say I was to call anytime day or night.’