The man with the crew cut and the bad scar down the side of his cheek looked like a Bond villain. He was pleasant enough as he led Costello up the carpeted stairs, deep-pile, claret red, immaculate. The pile going in opposite ways on each tread. On the walls of the stairway were framed photographs of trucks, departmental heads, two chief constables, all to showcase the legitimate part of the business. She might be a hard-nosed little cow up to her waxed armpits in organized crime, but Libby Hamilton appeared to have friends in high places.
Libby was one of the most powerful women in Scotland. She’d give the love child of Nicola Sturgeon and Angela Merkel a good run for their money. There was the size of her desk, the two male heavies doubling as secretaries, both with battle-scarred, angry faces sitting outside, even the female at the front desk looked as though she could go a few rounds with Henry Cooper.
And Libby was good. It was easy to take over a business with a little bit of carrot if you could back it up with a lot of stick. Refusal to be bought out for a reasonable fee resulted in something being burned down and then worth nothing. After that, any offer was likely to be accepted. Costello had no idea how the organized crime unit felt about it, there was no doubt the family were running huge amounts of drugs around the country. But she felt it in her bones, rather than knew, that Libby was more useful to the control of illegal substances, than legitimate forces of law and order. Remove her family from the equation and there would be a vacuum, that the Russians, or the Chinese would fill. As far as she knew, there had never been any real attempt to remove Libby’s family from power. Those that tried were found floating in the Clyde, if they were found at all. Nobody knew how many more were helping to hold up concrete pillars or had provided some sustenance for pigs.
It was far from ideal but the drugs on the street were cleaner than they used to be.
And there was a lot to be said for knowing the enemy.
Mr Scarface opened the door to the office and stood to one side, the cloud of his pungent scent drifted and dispersed to be replaced by another, more vomit-inducing stink.
The top of the huge oak desk was like any other company director’s, monitor, keyboard, mobile phone neatly beside a gold pen, the landline telephone resting on a stand. But the woman in the corner was unrecognizable from the suited and booted young successful woman about town, which had been Costello’s last impression of Libby. This was a fleece-wearing, hair scraped back, exhausted human being, holding another smaller human being by the ankles while she scraped away at its bottom with a cloth.
‘Bugger,’ she said, turning to see Costello. ‘Oh hello, can you hand me one of those wee wipes?’
‘Aye.’
Libby took the fresh wipe, having to hand Costello the one smeared with foul smelling brown lumps. But she did it with a guilty smile. ‘Sorry, there’s a bin and a sink over there. I never have enough hands for this. I mean, how are you supposed to manage?’
Costello opened the tab on the plastic bag lying next to the bin and added the latest offering to what seemed a large collection. She taped it back up.
‘Congratulations, I hadn’t heard.’ Costello took a large squirt of Molten Brown’s hand cream and had a good rub in, it gave her nose something else to concentrate on.
‘My baby was born in better circumstances than I was.’
‘Yes, I remember. I was there. One of my first crime scenes.’
‘Your first murder scene.’
‘Yes, it was,’ Costello said.
‘I heard later that you got into trouble for holding her hand, my mum’s hand.’
‘I probably did. Terrible what happened to her.’
‘But I survived, thanks to you.’
‘Thanks to the surgeons at the hospital,’ she corrected.
The small person seemed intent on escaping before Libby could secure another nappy on it. Once she had, she set it free on the floor, the chubby baby rolled over, got up on all fours and started lumbering around the carpet like a drunk, overweight puppy.
‘Do you think that’s bad for him?’ Libby asked. ‘I mean I work on the principle that it builds a healthy immune system, you know, exposing himself to anything that happens to be stuck on that carpet.’ She sat behind the desk, cleaning her hands with sanitizer, twice, then caught Costello’s eye. ‘What do you want?’
Now it came to it, Costello didn’t know how to start; it was the baby who was putting her off.
‘If I wanted you dead in a canal, Costello, you would be but I acknowledge we have history so you get a bit of leeway. If you want somebody dead in a canal, just let me know.’ Libby smiled as she pressed the button. Then Mr Scarface came in. ‘Could you take that out and put it down the waste chute. God help any dosser asleep at the bottom of it.’
She waited until the door was closed. ‘He stinks. I pay him enough money so he can buy very expensive aftershave, shame he also bought a bucket to put it on with.’ She sat back in her seat a little, looking like any tired mother of a tot. Then looked directly at Costello.
‘I was just wondering if you knew of any activity, any paedophile activity, that’s picked up recently in the area and—’
‘No. I wouldn’t allow it. Next question.’
‘It’s extreme. I am concerned that very young children, babies, are being abducted.’
‘Abducted? Or sold.’ Libby swung round in her seat a little.
Costello noticed the lack of surprise. ‘I am not sure.’
‘If it was peado issues, in this city I would know. And there isn’t. Not in the way you mean. Those bastards watch videos, but those were not filmed here. Have you spoken to O’Hare, your pathologist friend?’
‘Why?’
‘You should.’
Costello was acutely aware of the small one making his ungainly way around her feet. She was also becoming cognisant that Libby knew more about the situation than she did.
‘People think that the city is safe with all the surveillance present in the corners of the city where the lost and vulnerable gather. They stop thinking about it but it’s business as usual, it’s easy to pick on the vulnerable. In the past they were taken into the shadows and abused, now they are taken out of view and abused. Nobody is more at risk than a pregnant runaway or a prostitute. They can be persuaded to see their baby as a way out.’
‘Baby brokering?’ Costello’s brain was already joining the dots, knowing that Libby never gave a straight answer to anything.
‘I am not saying anything.’ Libby licked her thin red lips. ‘That’s not so difficult. I spend my life dealing with people who wouldn’t blink an eye at that and worse. You do too. But see how my office is nicer, I get paid more.’ She smiled at her son. ‘Why not let women sell children that do not exist because nobody knows they have been born. Travelling families have been doing it for years.’
Costello had heard that before. ‘In this Big Brother society? Nobody knows that these kids are born?’ Then she thought about Paige Riley. Nobody close to her had even noticed that she had gone missing.
‘Nobody. Where there is a will to do something, it can be done. Anybody involved in criminality knows that. It’s all doable. More doable because unimaginative cops never think it could be done. It actually makes it easier, all that hidden in plain sight. Just think what they did back in the old days. Pregnant women left town to have a child, then came back minus the kid. Easy if nobody knows about the pregnancy in the first place.’ She reached down and pulled open a drawer, then slid out a photograph. ‘Do you know that girl?’
Costello looked at the picture; a girl, sitting on a railing somewhere, smiling, early twenties. ‘She was a drama student, well, actress.’
‘As opposed to a hostess?’
They exchanged a smile that went nowhere.
‘And have you seen this, yesterday’s paper?’ Libby licked her forefinger and flicked over a few pages. ‘Look at this girl here.’ she showed Costello the article. ‘Sex worker, another one found dead beside a skip in a back alley out in Anderston.’
‘Yes, I heard about it. But I am working out in Domestic Abuse now not in Major Incident so it passed me by.’ Costello guessed she knew what was coming.
‘She went up there with a punter and whatever transaction passed between them ended with him grabbing her head and battering it against the edge of a skip. She died later in hospital.’
‘I know.’
‘For what? The forty quid she had in her hand for five minutes? She was left dying, collapsing slowly in her own piss and shit, his spunk still running out the side of her mouth. If she had been able to phone somebody, she would be alive. But he had stamped on her phone.’
‘You should be a cop, Libby, come and join us on the domestic violence unit.’
‘Prevention is better than cure, you know that.’
‘Are you saying you are out there looking after prostitutes? Libby, really, did you have some kind-hearted vigilantes out there, watching her?’
‘Not to … not on my watch.’
She had been about to say ‘not to one of my girls’ then confirmed it by adding, ‘This however was one of my girls.’ She pointed to the girl on the railing. ‘She was a resting actress, worked as a hostess in one of my clubs.’
Costello quoted, ‘And anything that happens beyond that introduction was a deal brokered between the two of them and a totally private matter. Kind of standard phrase for people who are little more than pimps.’
‘Indeed.’ She looked at the picture again. ‘She was murdered last year.’
Costello looked at the picture again, trying for recognition and failed. Even without a name, the face should have meant something. Was she so disconnected, so focussed at domestic abuse that she was missing a bigger picture.
‘These might help you more.’ And Libby handed her a thick file of photographs, glossy 12 by 10s, from the coding on the bottom, the date and time stamp the police logo at the top, these were obviously the scene of crime photographs.
‘How did you get your hands on these?’
‘Never mind, just look.’
‘Libby, it’s a criminal offence for you to have these. Do they have a leak at the MIT?’
‘Oh, stop it,’ she laughed, incredulous at Costello’s innocence. ‘Everybody has a price, Costello, even you.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’ She pulled the photographs back. ‘You won’t report this, you will ruin an honest young man’s career.’
Costello remembered the pictures on the wall as she came up the stairs. Maybe she was not the only one who’d sat here and asked for help.
‘My jungle, my rules,’ she said, tapping the picture, ‘and this is not acceptable. She had just had a baby, you know, there was no sign of it. Anywhere.’
‘A missing baby.’
‘Well, the baby wasn’t where it should have been.’
‘It wasn’t my case,’ said Costello, quietly, knowing how inadequate it sounded.
‘Maybe it should be now. You should talk to her friend.’
‘Who.’
Libby ignored the question. ‘She had been talking about changing her job, and that she had come across something more lucrative, much more lucrative.’
‘What, cutting out the middle man, sorry woman, and keeping all the money for herself?’
Libby smiled. ‘Well, she didn’t get that far. She got killed instead. When are you seeing your pathologist next? Maybe you should talk to him.’
‘I will, can I keep these?’ Costello asked mischievously but Libby put the pictures in her desk drawer. ‘Those photographs are Police Scotland property.’
‘What photographs?’ asked Libby with a face that wouldn’t melt butter. ‘And while you are about it, can you find out what bastard did that to her and then let me know.’
‘I will find out what happened to her, the rest goes to higher power than mine.’
‘I am a higher power than you.’ Libby stood up and looked out the window, and was quiet for a few moments. The baby crawling on the floor started mouthing a bubble-blowing tune. ‘I grew up without my mother. I don’t know … how had she looked? Alive? Tell me, can you still see her, in your mind’s eye.’
‘Yes, I do. Clear as day,’ Costello answered honestly.
‘We are not so different.’ Then she was her animated self again. ‘Here’s the number of somebody to speak to. Call her Suzy and she’ll be happy to talk to you. Watch yourself going down the stairs, they get slippery when wet.’
Valerie Abernethy was drunk, but she was a functioning drunk so nobody really noticed, or if they did notice they didn’t care. The lies were about to start now, she could do the right thing or the wrong thing. Archie had advised her that she had to do the right thing for her and not for anybody else. It was her life. OK, so she had totally misled him as to what the issue was, but the end result was the same. Since her dad died, she had become to rely on Archie. Funny how life seemed when there was no backbone to it, no Dad, no Mum. Valerie had woken up the day after her dad’s death to realize that she was now the responsible generation. She had been drunk most of that day.
Archie never saw it. He never saw anything bad in his god-daughter and she gave him a false impression of how happy she was. Archie thought he knew how much Grieg had hurt her yet he had nothing to do with the black state of her mind.
Was it a common thing in the world today to shape or ruin a life by the pressing of one button? When Fat Boy had been deployed, its mission to wreak havoc on the population of Hiroshima, did the person who pressed the button have any last-minute little doubts, at the final point when all the talking and decision-making that had gone on before, came down to the pressing of one button?
One look in the papers told her that on Facebook one status, or comment, like a photo could spark off cyberbullying that could lead to suicide. One click could start a petition that could bring down a government. Another click could start a war.
There was a message on her phone. Her heart quickened when she read it. This was what she had been waiting seven months for.
She would be happy. She quickly typed a reply and pressed send, feeling weirdly free of the stress ball that had been gathering in her stomach over the last few weeks.
She closed the phone and put it into her bag. She went upstairs into her bathroom and looked at her face. No evidence of her fall last night. She took a few mouthfuls of vodka from the bottle she kept in the cabinet. Her face betrayed nothing. No evidence of her problem, the grey ghost that stalked her. The hidden little friend, the beguiling little companion that told her everything would be OK. And how much delusion was possible. How much self-delusion.
She turned sideways and stuck her stomach out. Is that how she would look if she was pregnant?
She’d stop drinking then. She’d have a reason to.
She drank because she was unhappy, if she was happy she wouldn’t drink.
She was the master of self-delusion her entire life. God, her entire life was a delusion – she was here in her six-hundred-thousand pound flat, with her Porsche and her Christian Louboutins. She was a feared prosecutor in court. In reality, she was a single woman who was so devastated at the death of her cat, she had got pissed and passed out on the kitchen floor. Looking closer in the bathroom mirror, she could see her make-up was doing a good job of hiding the bruise on the side of her face, but that too, that face, was a delusion. She had two different faces, one for each world. She had thought that her law degree would be enough in her professional world and that her marriage was enough personally. Both had failed her. Grieg had had an affair with a girl called Tania, Tara, Toni, something like that. She was eight years younger than Valerie. But Valerie had had her affair first, with a cheap bottle of vodka.
Now she didn’t even have Alfred to tell her worries to.
She had tried to save her marriage, saying she would stop drinking and would try an IVF programme but that was a non-starter right from the get go. Her private gynae had sat in that posh office. She could remember the feel of the polished wood of the chair arm under her hands, her fingers were coiling and uncoiling. She knew what he was going to say before he said it, and why he had suggested, pointedly, that she might want to attend her appointment on her own.
You’ve got to stop the drinking.
With all the Bernadette Kissel’s in the world, he had sat there in his posh office and told her that she was unfit to be a mother.
‘You aren’t suitable for the programme?’ Grieg had asked, as she was holding onto the worktop for support. He had asked her to seek help. Her hesitation had been a moment too long. And, though her recollection wasn’t too good – she had been drunk at the time – she was sure that was the moment he had walked into the bedroom and started packing for the first time.
And, she thought, looking at the water as it ran down the sink, that was the last time he had packed.
She turned the tap off and went to pack a suitcase of her own.
Eddie McFadden was settling down to his favourite evening of the week. Thursday nights were for chilling. She was away at the bingo and if he was in luck, she would be out before he came in from work. Then he would nip out the house for special fish and chips with curry sauce, the pea and ham soup that the wife had left him would go to the dog – although sometimes the dog turned his nose up at it. Eddie would scoff his high cholesterol but delicious supper with a hot cup of tea and a whole box of Jaffa cakes. He would spend the night at the computer looking through his photographs, the ones he had taken the weekend before, at his regular haunt, the RSPB reserve at Lochwinnoch. The weather hadn’t been good last time but he had spent a good hour moving from hide to hide. Although these days he was finding the reeds and the water more interesting than the birds although he always had a soft spot for the swans, majestic, beautiful and bloody vicious.
He boiled the kettle again and filled his cup, put an old episode of On The Buses on the TV and settled down, loading the photographs from the memory card onto the hard drive. He clicked through them one by one, deleting all those out of focus or misfires.
It wasn’t unusual for the images to catch something that he himself had not seen. The old adage was true, the camera never lies. When he first saw the ghostly shape in the water, at first he thought it was a dead swan, white and undulating below the surface, caught in the reeds as the slight waves buffered it. Then he thought it was a shadow on the lens on the water or a bright reflection of the moon. Then he noticed its extreme white colour, blanched, devoid of all tone, floating around and seeming to shimmer between the frames. It was difficult to make out any shape. He brushed his salty hands down his cardigan and looked again. Plastic bag? They were so bad for the birds, it made him furious, Castle Semple and the loch were not in the city centre, they were not places that attracted other people’s garbage. This was a nature reserve, people had to know the place was here and drive out or get the train out. People came here because they loved nature or because they canoed or rowed. The kind of people that should respect the place.
He sighed and swore under his breath. Last year there had been boys down there with airguns, taking pot shots at the swans. He’d bloody drown them if he ever caught them. He was a big guy, he could still handle himself.
He clicked on a few frames. The white ghost in the water took on a definite shape and form, bigger than a swan, much bigger. He had the semi-submerged tree trunk to scale it. Was it two swans, wrapped together in death as they were in life? As he focussed he thought he could make out a waist, shoulders. It faded as it sank deeper onto the water like two wings or two arms, or was it all a trick of his mind. But the last photograph confirmed it. He spread his fingers on the screen. He had a good camera, the larger image lost no resolution. He could see wisps of ebony hair across the stark ivory of her cheek, like a doll thrown away in a fit of temper. He looked closer at the detail. Not a doll, not a doll at all.
Anderson wanted some peace and quiet. He had been sitting in his kitchen with a strong cup of black coffee and a pile of toast ladled with butter. On the island in front of him he had the pictures of Gillian Witherspoon and Sally Logan as she was then. He had been studying them for a while, a blank A4 notebook on the worktop beside him, the virgin white page was now full of scribbles.
He had phoned Gerry Stewart. Gillian’s widower seemed happy to hear from him. And had answered his single question with hesitation, and then said, Thank God you asked.
Gillian had been having her shoulder operated on when she died. The pain from the ligamentous injury that she had sustained during her assault.
And the more he flicked through the pictures, the more similarities he saw. He was running his fingers over the pale features of Sally, standing against a white wall, wearing a light-blue paper gown, the camera catching the depth and the scale of her injuries against a flat rule. He wondered if he could talk to her about the noise and …
He shut the file as the kitchen door flew open.
‘Dad, are you going out on a date? Tonight again?’ Claire was insistent, as if she wanted the house to herself. He shouldn’t have stayed out last night. He was overcome with a huge sense of guilt, with no idea why. Should he have told Claire to go out to Brenda’s and spend the night there as he wouldn’t be home?
But he wouldn’t have changed last night at all. It had been such a long time since he had talked like that, drank like that. He had left the car, forgotten and abandoned outside in the mud. He had fallen asleep easily on the sofa at the Braithwaite’s house in front of the log fire that itself was tiring and failing. He had woken up to the smell of bacon sizzling in a pan, the pain that he had thought was angina turned out to be the cat lying on his chest. He had a brisk wash in freezing cold water in the bathroom, bare floorboards and curling wallpaper. He had slipped his anorak on, not wanting to presume that the bacon was for him, then had followed the quiet, low-ceilinged hall back to the kitchen where the smell intensified to a mouth-watering degree. The kitchen was empty, three rashers of bacon lay on the frying pan, a cut roll beside it already buttered, a mug, coffee in the coffee maker. Braithwaite was outside, in the drizzle, anorak on, having a coffee and his bacon roll, his bum perched on the old fence that must have bordered the flower garden at some time. He turned around and gestured to the bacon.
Five minutes later, Anderson too was outside, feeling the light rain on his face. He was ripping apart the bacon roll like he hadn’t eaten for a fortnight, and he knew why pathologists and crime scene officers loved bacon rolls after being at the grisly crime scene. They had a comforting aroma.
He had come home to have a shower and get changed before going late into work and was slightly miffed that nobody seemed to have missed him. Nobody asked where he had been, he could have been in bloody Casualty for all they knew. Or cared.
Then Sally had phoned. He couldn’t say that he wasn’t flattered about the way that conversation had gone. But it wasn’t right, they were not the same two people now that they had been then. Not at all.
So he had gone to work and not concentrated on anything.
It was half eight now and he was lying down on the settee of the big house, trying not to think why the Marmite was out even though Claire hated it, or why Claire might want him to go back out again.
Instead he decided to lie down on the big sofa and have a think about the case. Costello had sent him an email with Laphan’s thoughts on the issue of baby brokering, and his thoughts in a nutshell were that it could be entirely possible and extremely profitable.
Once he had sat down at his desk he had put all his memories of Helena and Sally behind him, and then spent an unfruitful two hours listening to his colleagues in the office, reading over the plans for the new poster girl for the SafeLife campaign, tinkering with it and making suggestions on how they might be able to sell this to Sally. She hadn’t said yes, but she hadn’t said no.
And it was an excuse to see her again.
He had still been in the office when Costello phoned to update him on her visit to Libby Hamilton and that she was following a solid lead. He had been surprised, an email and a phone call. Was it force of habit, a habit that she had not acted on for the previous few months? Or was she taunting him, making him jealous as she ran around, out in the big world doing detective work, then phoning him with clues and asking him what he thought. Or had she sensed that he was jealous of the curry they had all been out for. He was jealous of the meeting she had set up with a prostitute called Suzy.
He was jealous of her.
Libby and Dali had arrived at the same conclusion, one was a woman of utter integrity and the other wrote her own rules. They had both hinted there was baby brokering going on. That was illegal. But more worrying was the abduction of other children.
And Mulholland’s story intrigued him, a pregnant woman in a blue coat had walked down the lane and disappeared. He closed his eyes and imagined the lane with walls on either side. Two doors in the wall of the Old Edwardian, then that wee patch of dirt. There was no back door, no entry to the building or the office building on the lane apart from the lift. He had an invitation to view the security film from the lift but thought it prudent to send Mulholland and Wyngate. They had checked out Wrights Insurance. Did she get picked up in a car? Not with the bollard up. There had been no noise of a motorbike or scooter. There were no outside iron stairs up the building. What about downwards, any basements? He wondered if that had been checked, the floor of the yard? A trapdoor of some sort? He was being fanciful but they had learned a lesson one night on a hill above that long, slow drag known as the Rest and Be Thankful. There could be anything underground.
Curious, he pulled out his phone and typed in the word Grahamston.
The fictional village that lay under Glasgow. It had never really existed surely. The rumours were that it had been abandoned in the 1870s. It was supposed to be buried under the concourse of Glasgow Central Station and to spread westward. And it was a fiction. A mere fiction that had grown up over the years, nothing but whispers and conjecture that had blossomed to fact.
The lane was less than two blocks away from the western edge of where Grahamston was purported to be, go one block further south and there was the river. The river still had old tunnels underneath, right in the heart of the city. The rotundas, now restaurants, were used for turning horse-drawn vehicles back in the day, allowing them to shuttle back and forth.
OK, so he allowed himself that hypothesis. What was going on that warranted a pregnant woman to hide there? The concealment of the birth of a baby.
‘Hello.’ The door opened, a pleasant-looking blonde smiled.
Costello walked into a flat, decorated in every shade of grey, very trendy with a circular settee that nobody could sit in. She couldn’t help herself but look at Suzy’s arms, no track marks. She was clean, she looked healthy. Libby’s punters did not like girls infected with the needle. It was bad for business.
The recent TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was on the television. Suzy clicked it to silence as she sat down.
‘Suzy?’
‘I know who you are and I know why you are here.’
‘I would like to think that you are talking to me without duress.’ Costello sat down. ‘And that you are free to say what you need to say.’
‘I am, I knew Janet or Sonja as she was known professionally. I knew her quite well in the early days, two years back, we both started out in …’
‘Business together?’ Costello offered
‘Some of the girls do a bit of extra work, to help with their grants, you know. Some men coming into the nightclub want young, bright company, especially if they come from overseas.’
‘I get the picture,’ said Costello, ‘but to my mind you are no better than the girl who ended up with her head bashed in against the side of the skip. You live a risky life.’
‘I am a hostess not a prostitute.’
‘You live a risky life,’ Costello repeated.
‘Janet and I, we were hostessing together at the Red Door, do you know it?’
‘I know it as a knocking shop.’
‘We can earn a lot of money, and I do declare it for tax before you start on that.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’ Costello wondered about the society they lived in. OK to sleep with men for money, not OK to exclude it from the self-assessment tax return.
‘It’s not illegal to work as a hostess,’ Suzy said primly.
‘So I keep hearing. What about Janet?’
‘Janet was there as well, she resented the fact that we had to give some of our earnings over as rent to the …’
‘Management?’ offered Costello.
‘Indeed, and she decided to go out on her own, make more money and the next thing I heard she was working at another nightclub.’
‘What club?’
‘Something like The Pond.’
‘The Pond, is that anything to do with the Blue Neptune?’
‘Yes, it’s a small cocktail bar at the back. It’s quite exclusive.’ She looked at Costello, wondering how somebody like her knew about it.
‘I’ve arrested a few guys in the toilets,’ lied Costello in answer to the unasked question.
‘Well, Janet was working there until the bosses found out and then she was asked to move on. Then I heard she was pregnant and I thought, well, that will be her, you know, out the game.’
‘Not hostessing or …’
‘Or just get rid of the baby.’
‘Occupational hazard in the world of hostessing?’ asked Costello, trying to keep the sarcasm from her tone.
‘Maybe.’ Suzy wriggled forward on the couch. ‘But she said to me that it was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And that she was going to earn a fortune.’
Costello felt her heart jump, and resisted the urge to rush the next question. ‘What? Did she say how?’
‘Not specifically but I think she was talking about … well, somebody wanted a baby and … well she said why not. She mentioned thousands of pounds, thousands and thousands of pounds.’ Her envy was obvious.
‘Selling it?’ Costello tried to keep her voice calm.
‘She didn’t say exactly, but I think so. She was off work for a while. Then I heard she had been found dead in a bedsit.’ Suddenly Suzy looked young and vulnerable.
‘Why did you not come forward?’
‘Libby said I was to wait until you came to me.’
‘Has anybody ever approached you to carry a child?’
Suzy recoiled in horror. ‘That’s disgusting.’
It had taken Costello forty minutes to track down the port-mortem reports she was looking for, O’Hare had been helpful but distant, as if he was too tired to be bothered with it all. But as she gave him more details he admitted he did recall the case, for one good reason. His colleague’s comments over lunch that she had just done an autopsy on a woman who seemed to have given birth, lost the baby, then stitched herself up.
‘And that’s not something you hear every day.’
Costello made an involuntary squeaking noise. ‘So we are looking for a medically trained contortionist with little maternal instinct?’
‘I don’t know, there was a rush put on it by the fiscal, so somebody has walked this road before you. Good luck.’
And that had sparked her interest. If there was a fiscal out there suspecting criminality, then her life could get much easier. She flicked through the report sitting in her office, late, accompanied by a packet of Liquorice Allsorts. Janet Gibson had decided her name was not sexy enough, so she became Sonja. She noted the stomach contents listed as they had been at the time of the post-mortem: Devon Crab, deep fried seaweed and tofu curd. Not the average Glaswegian fayre. Devon crab was expensive stuff. She presumed the pathologist had tested to try to ascertain where the deceased had eaten their last meal. The food was largely undigested, so she had died a short time after, which might explain why this report had been scanned in at the front of the file.
She clicked on to a colour picture of Janet lying on the slab, looking rather thin-faced and a bit piqued at being dead. The next click brought up the same picture that Libby had in her drawer.
Costello scanned the report, picking out bits and scribbling them down. Janet had not been an active sex worker. She was well nourished, not a drug abuser, her death had slid past the pathologist as Janet had given birth recently, and fatality from post-birth embolism was not unheard of. The red flag for Costello, and maybe the mysterious fiscal, was the lack of a baby. There was a suggestion it had been stillborn but only because it was absent, which was an arse for elbow way of looking at it.
Janet was ripe for the taking; bright, overworked at uni and had no close family. She had nobody at all. And, noted in bold, the door of her bedsit had been locked from the inside so the attending police officer had deduced suicide or natural death.
Costello wasn’t aware that cause of death was now in their remit but she believed in ‘live and learn’.
Even the length of the post-mortem report was cursory. Costello started clicking through the images, the good clean images of the crime scene that she had seen earlier. Janet was in bed, dead. It was a PC Maria Delany who was first on the scene, a quick check showed she was a constable on the south side. A new graduate who seemed to have taken a lot of it on herself.
There was a sense of presumption in the report that Costello didn’t like. Janet was not a prostitute, the pathologist twice reported that it was unlikely Janet was a sex worker yet there was a derogatory tone to the language that didn’t belong in any murder report. Except there was no sign she was murdered.
The report went back to the fiscal, V. Abernethy. And it ended there.
She clicked back through the images of the room, a typical Southside lower end of the student market bedsit. A thin, badly stained beige carpet covered three quarters of the floor, leaving a wide strip of blue curled lino along the wall at a kitchen unit. A small flat-screen TV, a brightly patterned rug, a jug of water beside her bed and her iPod still sat in its black cradle with the green light on, showing it was powered up when the photograph was taken. Costello felt her heart sink, these little things, her iPod had still been alive when she had not.
Above the bed was a calendar with May showing a golden retriever puppy looking impossibly cute. She noted the date of the death. Sixth of May 2016. Only last year but she had no memory of it. The wall had recently been painted in a futile attempt to cover the bright yellow wallpaper with its large black flowers, with light cream paint but the pattern underneath was already showing through.
The room said a lot about her. Not a pleasant room. Delany’s report showed she was thinking death from natural causes straight away. A dangerous think for a young cop to think and a stupid thing to write down. But Costello knew the type. Delany had been qualified a fortnight, looked her seniors straight in the eye and pronounced a natural death obviously. Because she had wanted to get off duty.
Costello had had it rammed into her as a PC, that there was only one chance at the evidence. She found herself looking at the big window in the photographs, a modern window in an old bedsit flat one floor up. By law, it had to open far enough to let an adult out in the event of a fire.
Or if you needed an exit after locking the door from the inside.
She clicked on through the pictures. The camera had moved to the exterior of the room now, showing the narrow landing where the cord carpet beneath a pair of visible boots was worn to a thread.
Then there was the body, Janet lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling as if she was thinking about getting up, just contemplating the day and wondering if she could have another five minutes before the alarm went.
If Janet had been a student at the university there would be friends, tutors, counsellors that would spend the rest of their lives wondering if there was something that they should have said, or done. Questions that will not have been asked. Or answered. While Delany had been happy to stand outside looking at her watch.
There was a photograph of the crime scene manager, his face visible as he came up the stairs, phone clamped to the side of his head. There was the outline of a clipboard held in someone else’s arm, marking the arrival times and the identities of those attending the scene.
The body had been found by the landlord after concerns raised by the guy in the next room. Adele 21 had been playing continuously all night. So he had chapped the door, but Janet had not responded. The neighbour only knew her to say hello to on the stairs. Janet had kept herself to herself as was the way of bedsit land. And it was not unusual for her to play music late into the night but this was louder and later than usual, and she had been very quiet recently. So much so he thought that she might have been away, so did the landlord. Somebody had been careful enough to write that – away. Away to have her child?
The landlord had been called, he had a master key and together they found her body.
Costello looked at the images, willing Janet to tell her something. She had a growth of dark root at the top of her head, Costello knew pregnant woman stopped putting peroxide on their hair. She saw a few books stacked under her bedside light, Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christentum. Neitzsche. She wore red and white pyjamas, cheap nylon with the words, I want it all over the top. Costello examined the date on the puppy calendar again. Dates marked off with a cross in a thick black pen, the day before she died was marked with an asterix. Was that her due date?
So where was the baby? Foundlings were front page news these days; people do not have psychotic breaks quietly. And, she read the small footnote, Janet had no food in that bedsit. She hadn’t been living there.
She flicked back to the name of the fiscal who had requested the reports. V. Abernethy? She googled her and stared for a long time at the picture of the young, dark-haired lawyer. And the pretty silver butterfly necklace that hung round her long, feminine throat.
Then she googled five of the most expensive restaurants to see which ones served Devon Crab. At least the answer to that cheered her up.