Costello’s arrival at the school shortly after midnight was something of an anticlimax. She had been expecting some dramatic approach to the grand house of the photographs. But there was no sight of the grand blond sandstone turret or the immaculate sweeping driveway. No line of four-by-fours parked on the expansive gravelled forecourt, no tennis courts or neat hedges. Instead, Pettigrew simply drove, whistling tunelessly, along a tiny single-track road lined by trees, a mass of potholes with grass growing down the middle.
‘How on earth do you get any supplies in, with the road in this state?’ she asked. ‘I’d have thought a place like this would have a proper drive, with huge gates.’
‘We keep it like this,’ he replied. ‘For security – you can’t get in and out of here quickly. The remoteness of the school is a form of security in itself, though it’s only half an hour’s drive to Glasgow Airport. Well,’ he corrected himself, ‘half an hour until you get to this last bit. My house is well hidden at the top of this road, so I hear everybody go past – hence the rough road.’
Costello glanced around, seeing his point. She ignored the shiver of nerves that ran through her. ‘So, who was he?’
‘The dead guy?’ Pettigrew shrugged. ‘God knows. I wouldn’t recognize my own bookie if he’d had his face pecked off like that. And what the hell was he doing out there, miles from anywhere? It looked like a dump site. They’ll have left tyre marks, as they must have turned to go back down the glen. Nobody in their right mind would come up this road unless they knew it really well. All sensible folk take the high road.’
‘How do the pupils get here? And out again?’
‘I drive them mostly, pick them up at the train station in Balloch or go to the airport to get them. A few of the older ones have cars.’
‘Really? They’re allowed?’
‘Oh yes, as long as they’re taxed, insured, et cetera. If you’re paying £25,000 a year for an education, it’s no hardship to shell out on a wee motor. But they’re not allowed to go off on their own. Makes my job bloody hard, though, trying to keep tabs on the wee buggers.’
Costello thought back to her conversation with Howlett, seeing a bigger pattern to his problems. These were not kids who could be contained. ‘Is that really part of your remit?’
‘Technically, not at all. Once they’re off campus they can do what they like. They’re eighteen, some of them, legal adults, so what can we do to stop them? But at the same time the school has a duty of care.’
‘Supposedly.’
‘This is your place, here.’ He had brought her right to the door of an old stable block at the rear of the school.
She could now see the dark outline of the turret nearby, its crenellations etched against the sky, and she could smell the sweet scent of a lawn recently cut. There was no great history lesson; Pettigrew simply handed her a key.
‘I think it’s all been set up for you. If not, give us a buzz and I’ll come over. Don’t use your mobile, the signal’s terrible unless you go higher up the hill. There’s a landline phone in the room, and my number’s on the handset.’
Costello looked out at the night, and the dim rolling hills that seemed to rise like tsunamis on both sides of the valley. It was an oppressive place. ‘And where are you?’ she asked, wary of being on her own, out here in the dark.
‘Like I said, I’m at the top of the drive. But don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’ He jumped into the car, and drove off, leaving her standing alone with her bags on the sandstone paving.
She slid the key into the lock and the old wooden door opened without a sound. Before she stepped inside she felt around for the light switch. Her fingers found an old-fashioned round switch, and she flicked it.
The interior of the room was like a Scandinavian hotel, all polished wooden floors, with a sofa, a TV, a big fire, a bathroom, and a wee kitchen at the back of the living room, then a set of wooden stairs up to a mezzanine where she presumed the bed would be.
She was so tired she just wanted to make a cup of tea and flop under the duvet. She closed the door behind her, and turned on the light in the bathroom – nice clean tiles, and a brand-new shower with huge cream fluffy towels. In the kitchen, somebody had left her a welcome pack of tea, coffee, bread and butter. Enough to make some tea and toast. That made her mind up – she was going to put the kettle on, then have a shower and wash the midges out of her hair so she could stop scratching.
She was trying not to think about the body, about the crows that had been feasting on its face, their black wings flapping and clapping over their banquet. And she was absolutely not going to think about the crow that had looked at her, and what it had had in its beak. She was determined to feel safe here. She turned back to the front door to lock it. There were four deadbolts on the inside.
‘My God, what is that smell?’ Lambie wrinkled his nose.
Anderson answered without lifting his head from the newspaper. ‘Vik’s aftershave.’
Lambie slipped his lightweight jacket from his shoulders, and looked round for somewhere to hang it. Not seeing any coat stands or hangers, he hung it over the back of a student’s hard chair, before selecting a padded chair to sit on. Wyngate was filling the huge whiteboard with photographs of Biggart’s crime scene, and a side panel was dedicated to the death of Mrs Melinda Biggart. The smaller of the two lecture rooms had been turned into a handy little investigation room, the only downside being the lack of natural light, and no windows to open. The upside was the glorious silence and the well-tuned air conditioning. The fact that it was near the hospital café and their wonderful coffee was a bonus.
‘Can you put up something about wee Rusalka?’ Anderson asked. ‘There’s a few ideas of my own I was sketching out last night before I drove into a Hitchcock set. Not nice.’ He handed Wyngate a single sheet. ‘I’m sure Rusalka is connected to this. And I’m sure Biggart has been making films in that room – it’s the only explanation I can think of for the strange holes in the ceiling. Even if there’s no connection, I want whoever put her in the river nailed to a wall slowly. We are three full days into this and we are getting nowhere. Have you seen this, Lambie?’ He tossed the newspaper over to his sergeant as Wyngate went to the door in response to a knock.
‘Bridge Boy? They’ve done a good job. We’ll get a whole load of stuff come in on that.’ Lambie looked around the room. ‘Are we supposed to be manning the phones?’
‘No, the calls are going through to a helpdesk at Partick. They’ll phone through with the possibles. Did I tell you Costello was going out to Glen Fruin Academy to take a wee look at a situation they have? On the drive out there last night we found a body.’ Anderson was handed an envelope by Wyngate, blank apart from the words ‘DCI Anderson’ written on it in small neat writing. It was the first time he had seen it written down.
‘Sheep?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The body, was it a sheep?’
‘No, human. Like I said, it was a scene from a Hitchcock film.’
‘Really?’
‘Hit and run, then eaten by birds. But why out on that road, and why wearing a suit?’ Anderson shrugged. ‘No ID, not a thing. But he did have money on him.’
‘Did you look?’
‘Wouldn’t you? The security guy at the school was a plod up at Maryhill in the past, so we had a wee mosey around. Called in the locals, who called in O’Hare. A uniform from Balloch and I nipped up to the road. Tyre tracks everywhere. The lab is getting on to it now.’
‘And we care because … ?’ asked Lambie.
Anderson was busy tearing the envelope open, ‘Because there’s something bloody weird going on up at Glen Fruin and I’m not happy that Costello is there, isolated.’ Anderson missed the look Lambie was giving him. ‘O’Hare thought the body had been run over, then the vehicle reversed and ran over it again. So, he called in the road incident guys. That was when I bowed out and came home.’
‘Nothing to do with us,’ repeated Lambie, wondering what his boss was thinking.
‘Howlett sent us here and sent her there. Think about it.’ Anderson read the single sheet of paper. ‘Well, listen to this. The body was kicked off the road a wee bit, and just left. And Matilda says it was a van, a Transit or some such from the tyre tracks. She’ll get back to us later with something more exact.’
‘Hundreds of Transits about, Colin,’ Lambie said warningly. ‘But you are right, it is some kind of recurring theme.’
‘And the only one they managed to trace had false plates.’ Anderson pointed at the Bridge Boy on the whiteboard. ‘That was this Transit van, and its front offside tyre has a cross-shaped insult on it. Distinctive and identifiable. Once she’s analysed the tracks in Glen Fruin, we’ll know for certain whether there’s a connection.’
‘It bothers me that the forensic services are putting us at the top of their priorities.’
‘Why does that bother you, DS Lambie?’
‘Because it feels like we are doing somebody’s dirty work for them. Howlett’s?’
Anderson ignored him. ‘What about Carruthers? Anything?’
‘Had a quick word with the priest. He said Carruthers was honest, devout, stable, didn’t smoke, gave up all alcohol more than thirty years ago.’ Lambie pulled a face. ‘I kind of feel he’s trying to tell me something, but the secrecy of the confessional and all that … even with Carruthers dead.’ Lambie paused for a minute. ‘There’s nothing big in the story.’
‘Apart from the fact the man died.’
‘The doc is the same – evidence that something had been troubling him recently. His GP notes say he stopped drinking, just like that –’ he snapped his fingers ‘– in early 1977. He’s been on sleeping tablets on and off since.’
‘So, what happened to him in 1977?’
‘Indeed. I need to speak to Mary without Rene being there. But she lives on the same landing, and any time somebody goes to Mary’s door, she’s out there like a demented troll. I asked the good Father if he thought Carruthers had killed himself, and he said no, not under any circumstances. He was too good a Catholic for that. He would have gone to the priest first. He always has in the past. But whatever was on his mind, it had been really troubling him over the last few weeks. Might have been the money?’
‘Well, I think the safety catch on the window could have been removed by A. N. Other, and I think somebody could have tipped Tommy Carruthers up and out the window. There are marks on his hip that I think support that theory. I’ll get the Prof to take a look at them. It wouldn’t be that hard, to fling someone out a window – ‘defenestrate’, I suppose the word is. You’d just need to get them out the room, maybe making a cup of tea. Then you remove the catch, get them over to the window. That’s not hard either – you just comment on the view of the Campsies, ask what this or that building is – then you just tip ’em up and out.’
‘And having done that, how would they get out of the Carruthers’ flat without being seen by the CCTV … ?’ Lambie said suddenly.
‘What would I do?’ mused Anderson.
‘Apart from throw yourself out the window?’
‘I’d buy a newspaper, a can of Coke, take my iPod or a good book, go in, kill Carruthers, then leave the flat and go up in the lift. Get out, head for the emergency stairwell. You’d be well warned if anybody was coming.’
‘But who are we talking about? I need to ask Mrs Carruthers if …’ Lambie was interrupted by a noise like a wounded wolf howling across the tundra. There was a crash of furniture, more howling, and footsteps came pounding towards their door. Wyngate was nearest; he hurtled towards the door and met the woman face on, his momentum pushing her back into the other room.
Anderson and Lambie were both on their feet. The howling wasn’t aggressive. It was painful, anguished.
‘Let me see him, let me see him!’
Wyngate backed in through the door. Beyond him, Anderson could see a woman sobbing in the arms of a male uniform.
‘You might want to deal with this, guv.’
‘I doubt that,’ Anderson said quietly. Beyond the swing doors, a few people were hanging around, drawn by the commotion. The distressed woman was in her fifties, with unnaturally dark auburn hair, and was wearing a badly fitting black summer dress. She looked as though she carried the pain of the world with her. Then Anderson noticed she was wearing blue fluffy slippers.
‘I’ll take her through,’ he said firmly.
‘I wouldn’t advise it, sir,’ said the uniform. ‘She might be better having a seat in here.’ Then he spoke directly to the woman, pulling her hands from his neck like a mother with a clinging child. ‘Now, you sit over here and DCI Anderson will come and talk to you.’ As she sat down, he said in a side whisper, ‘I’ll call the medics. Just don’t let her see any of those photographs, sir.’
The woman jumped to her feet, mascara and tears running down her face. ‘Let me see him!’
‘OK, OK, but calm down, will you? Just calm down.’ Anderson tried his best to get her to sit down again.
‘Don’t tell me to calm down!’ she screamed in his face. ‘Just tell me where he is!’ She thrust a copy of the Daily Record at Anderson. ‘Tell me where my boy is!’
Costello had some toast and tea for breakfast, sitting in the small kitchen with the front door open to let the sunshine slant across the wooden floor. After throwing up, she had ventured out for her first real sight of Glen Fruin. The banks of Munros on either side had looked lilac in the distance, their peaks still shrouded by morning mist. But now the sun had burned off the haze to reveal the glen in all its verdant glory, with the river winding its lazy way from east to west. She went out and sat on the front step, in her new pyjamas, a cup of tea held firmly in both hands, closed her eyes and held her face up to the sun. There was a complete absence of any sound of so-called civilization, only birdsong and the lowing of cattle further up the glen.
She felt the warmth relaxing her face, but she was aware too of tightness in her shoulders, tension in the back of her neck. That meant there was a nagging worry somewhere. She didn’t think it was finding the body last night; she had merely been a witness to that. And it wasn’t Pettigrew, who had been efficient and understanding, delivering her to her accommodation with a merciful lack of fuss. No, her problem was that she was back at work, and she didn’t know if she could cope.
She showered, dressed in her suit and heels, and thought about what to carry, what she was supposed to be doing. Empty hands looked ridiculous, so she slipped her handbag over her shoulder and picked up the envelope Howlett had given her. With that under her arm she set off to explore.
On her way to the main house she walked along a small bricked path, coming across a snake of schoolchildren who were walking in pairs, making their way down to the river. All were dressed in perfectly matching blue tartan uniform, and all had wellies on their feet. They chatted quietly to each other, nodding or saying a polite hello to Costello as they passed by. She watched them all go – in her school they would have legged it to the bike sheds as soon as the teacher’s back was turned.
Smiling to herself, she went on her way. The main house was slightly lower than the stable block, and the badly tarmacked road wound round to the front of the house where it opened on to a vast forecourt covered in fine gravel so deep any normal car was in danger of being bogged down. Two statues stood either side of a flight of stone steps that led down to a formal garden with beautifully manicured lawns. One she recognized as the standard likeness of Robert the Bruce. The other she guessed, from the sandstone swathe of plaid and the huge claymore, would be Sir Humphrey Colquhoun, a man who’d seen a bit of bloodshed in his time, fruitlessly defending Glen Fruin from the vengeful McGregors. His staring eyes seemed fixed on a diagonal line of sprinklers lying idle across the lawn. The smell of freshly mown grass still hung in the air. Two boys, even younger than those going to the river, were photographing some flowers close up; one held the camera while the other made careful notes. She could imagine the future botanist filling his page with details, his tongue held between his teeth in concentration. Costello leaned on the balustrade to watch them for a few minutes, then she started to gaze at the view over towards the bank of green velvet on the south side of the glen. From somewhere behind her came a clattering of dishes from the distant school kitchen.
It was remarkably deserted out here; there must be lots of people around but every single one of them seemed to be hidden away in a classroom somewhere. She heard laughter, a female voice made a comment, and her ears caught the louder response. Costello couldn’t see anybody, but the voice had come from below her, as if people were sitting against the wall. She walked along nonchalantly, her face turned towards the house, seemingly studying the intricate heraldic carving over the main entrance, with the Colquhouns’ motto ‘Si je puis’ wound round the antlers of a stag. She trailed her fingertips along the balustrade, and hoped she looked perfectly normal, perfectly casual.
Just as she drew level with the main door of the school she heard the laughter again, and there was a flurry of movement below. A group of senior pupils were breaking up; some came up the stone steps towards her and another three girls set off across the lawn, their pace slow and measured as if they had all the time in the world. Even in school uniform, Costello thought, those three came from Planet Beautiful. She thought of giraffes in the Serengeti, models on the catwalk – these were women who existed to be looked at. They were almost a cliché – the leggy blonde, the brunette beauty, the milky-skinned redhead – like three perfect gemstones in a single setting, each showing the others to best advantage.
As they walked off, the tall blonde turned and raised a hand in greeting to Costello, as if she had known she was there all along.
‘I’m really sorry about this,’ Dino Marchetti kept saying, sweating profusely and mopping his forehead with a damp handkerchief.
‘Not totally your fault. The desk at Partick should never have told you we were here.’
‘But it’s that bloody book that’s stirred it all up for her. We tried to take out a court injunction against it being published, you know.’
‘And they refused. Yes, I did know,’ Anderson said mildly. They were sitting in the sun outside the Western Infirmary. Dino needed a smoke.
‘The lawyers said we’d do better to find something libellous and sue, but Maria’s in a terrible state – well, as you’ve seen.’
‘It would be nice to think that the book might help in some way, provoke a bit of a response from the public,’ Anderson tried. ‘It might move the case on. It’s never officially been closed, you know. Sorry, I’m just trying to find something positive in all this.’
Dino shrugged. ‘It’s been fourteen years. I’ve tried to move on but every time a body is found she thinks it’s him.’ He took a deep draw on his cigarette. ‘It’s so hard for her. She’s on a lot of medication.’
Anderson recognized that Dino needed to talk, and decided to let him.
‘I really thought Maria was beginning to accept it, until those lassies were found, two in Austria and one in America. Somebody’d kept them locked up for years and years, but they all came back. So every time a lad in his teens or twenties turns up unidentified, she’s convinced it must be him. That’s bad enough, but then something like this appears in the newspaper.’
Anderson still kept quiet. Both Marchettis were slim, dark-haired and fine featured, like the boy. He could understand why the mother would feel that flare of hope.
‘The worst thing is not knowing what happened, or why. Everyone thinks if you’re Italian, you’re in the Mafia, but we weren’t like that. We just ran a restaurant and an Italian deli. If someone had asked for money, I could understand that, and we’d have paid it, whatever they wanted. If some crazy person had stolen him and killed him, even that, you could see a reason for it. And we would have a body, something to bury. But this …’ Dino spread his hands and shrugged. ‘Nothing. Not a word. No trace of our son. Who could be so cruel?’ He mopped the back of his neck. ‘Has anybody identified this other boy yet?’
‘Not yet, unfortunately.’
‘You know, she won’t calm down until they do.’
‘We’re going to do a DNA test. That will tell us –’
‘That he’s not our son!’ Dino glared almost accusingly at Anderson.
‘I don’t doubt for a minute that this boy is not Alessandro. I’m sorry. But I think your wife needs proof. And a DNA test will provide that.’
Dino sighed. ‘You know we moved out the flat the day Alessandro was taken; we never went back.’
‘What can you tell me about the babysitter?’
‘Tito?’ Dino did not appear surprised by the question. ‘He was a good boy, we thought. No dad, ever, and his mum had died. Too fond of the drinking. And she was a little …’ He tapped his temple, adding a slight twisting movement. So, the mother had been a screwball as well as a drunk. ‘He started working in our kitchen at weekends when he was fourteen. Like I say, a good boy, played with little Alessandro in the shop. It was the first time he’d actually babysat him, just sitting in, watching TV. Maria and I were out at a charity dinner. We got home to find our son missing, Tito missing. There was blood everywhere but none of it matched the samples they took from Maria and me. The blood was not from our son.’ Dino crossed himself, and Anderson wondered how many times he had been through that story. ‘Is there any chance you might reopen the case?’
‘As I said, it was never closed. But I need a reason to reactivate it.’
Dino Marchetti placed a hand on Anderson’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. ‘Please do it – if not for me, then for her. Just to let her sleep at night.’
‘Can I ask you, and I have no reason for asking you, but were you happy with the way Eric Moffat conducted the investigation?’
Dino looked surprised. ‘I have nothing to compare it to. At the time yes, I was happy.’ The shrug of his shoulder was very Latin. ‘But with this book, I don’t know what to think.’
‘Do you recall a cop called Carruthers from that time? I know it was a long time ago.’
‘Oh, I remember them all, Mr Anderson. Every single one. But no, there was no Carruthers.’
Costello turned at the sound of hurried feet on the gravel. A thickset woman with wire-wool hair was running towards her, arm outstretched as if getting ready to pass a baton. ‘Hello, hello,’ she trilled. ‘I’m Rhona McMillan. I’m the Registrar here.’
Costello immediately wanted to smack her.
‘And I bet I know who you are!’ The woman pointed at her, excited as a kid in a chocolate factory. She hushed her voice. ‘You’re DS Costello. From the police!’ she added with relish.
‘That’s right,’ said Costello, slightly wrong-footed. She started to walk along by the balustrade, forcing Rhona to walk beside her. Three men in suits were coming out through the front door of the school, and Costello wanted a private conversation.
‘And I for one am very glad you’re here,’ Rhona hurried on. ‘I mean, of course it’s all very hush-hush, but we all know. I just hope you can do something about it.’
‘I’ll do the best I can,’ Costello replied sweetly, having no idea what the woman was blethering on about but feeling intrigued.
‘Well, I hope you got some sleep last night after that terrible news.’ Rhona looked over her shoulder nervously. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing to do with us.’
‘Any reason why it might be?’
‘Oh no, I’m just being silly. Anyway, have you had your breakfast?’ Rhona glanced at her watch. ‘Mr Ellis – he’s the Warden – wants to see you at twelve. He knows far more about it all than I do.’ She was one of those women who ask a question without expecting an answer. Probably nobody ever really listened to her.
‘I’ve eaten, thank you. Can you tell me who they are – the three girls walking over the lawn?’ Costello asked with her back towards them.
But Rhona stuck her head out, as unsubtle as an elephant. ‘Oh, Saskia, Keren and Victoria. They’re very beautiful, aren’t they? Funny how they gravitate towards each other. They’ll be leaving Glen Fruin this week for good.’ Rhona sighed. ‘It’s always sad when they go.’
‘Surely it’s good to get out and take on the world,’ Costello said. ‘I was desperate to leave school.’
Rhona threw her a look as if to say, ‘Well, you would be, wouldn’t you?’ But she said, ‘Saskia is going on to study in Italy. She’s actually Russian, well – half Russian, half Dutch. The Dutch being the Saskia, the Russian being the Morosova.’ She looked skyward, thinking. ‘Yes, that’s the right way round. She’s been here for four years now, perfecting her English, doing some more highers. Victoria is going back to the good old US of A and … oh, I’m not sure where Keren calls home. Dubai at the moment. She’s Irish, one of the Cork O’Learys.’
That was obviously supposed to mean something. ‘Quite a mixture,’ was all Costello said.
Costello’s eye was caught by Pettigrew, walking briskly after a plump dark-haired girl, both moving quickly into the cover of the shrubbery. The girl was upset, crying. She threw her arm out, pushing Pettigrew away. He obviously decided not to follow, saying something too quiet for Costello to hear, but his body language was an apology in itself.
‘What about her?’ Costello interrupted, pointing.
‘Oh, Elizabeth Hamilton. Poor girl, she really shouldn’t be here. I don’t know much about her. I think she lost both parents when she was very young, and her grandfather sent her here to be looked after as much as educated, as is the way with many boarding schools now. She boards, although he lives in Glasgow. She has nothing in common with the other girls, with their ponies and parties and frocks. She can’t keep up academically, financially or socially with any degree of confidence. She just doesn’t fit in. She rarely goes home, or to stay with any of the other girls here, and there’s no pairing up at weekends. She just keeps to herself. No close friends, nobody wants her. Except she doesn’t care, so it doesn’t bother her.’
Costello felt a stab in her heart.
The girl turned and looked after Pettigrew, who was walking back up the garden, then disappeared into the rhododendrons.
‘She’ll be going down the path to the bridge. She often sits there – smoking.’ Rhona made it sound as though the girl was guilty of ethnic cleansing. ‘You can’t help thinking that, no matter what her home situation is, she would be much better at an ordinary state school; she gains nothing from a school like this.’
‘But if she’s from Glasgow, why doesn’t she go to a local school? Nothing to stop her. What age is she?’
‘Seventeen.’
The girl became visible again, walking along a wooden path that led to a bridge, her ungainly short steps in stark contrast to the Three Graces’ elegant glide. She disturbed a crow that cawed loudly, taking off and flying up towards the school. The girl didn’t flinch, but watched it fly away, as if she envied the bird its freedom.
The Marchettis’ Mercedes pulled out of the car park, narrowly missing Mulholland’s Audi as it cut the corner on the way in. Anderson thought it wise to hold the door open for him. Mulholland drove like that when he was in a mood, and the mood was confirmed as he slammed the door and approached his boss.
‘I’ve got news for you. O’Hare has an ID on the body you found at Glen Fruin, and he wants to know why your mobile was turned off when he wanted to speak to you. And I would like to know when I become your answering service. So, I’m going for a coffee, DCI Anderson, before anybody else thinks I am your personal secretary.’ And with that he was gone, striding across the car park, leaving a trail of aftershave hanging in the air.
Anderson rang the pathologist’s number on his mobile, as he followed Mulholland across the car park to sit on the low wall. If O’Hare looked out of the window he would see him.
The phone was answered and O’Hare asked him to hang on. ‘No, don’t leave it there,’ he was saying, obviously trying to keep his exasperation under control. ‘It has to go in the fridge. No, not that fridge, that fridge.’
Anderson could imagine some bemused young student wandering around with a body part.
‘Colin, sorry to keep you waiting. Just thought you should know that your dead body is William Andrew MacFadyean.’
Anderson waited for the next bit; it meant nothing to him so far.
‘He was run over twice, as we suspected, killed on the road then taken to one side, out of sight. You should have a word with –’
‘Matilda McQueen. Yes, I will.’
‘But what was he doing up there?’ O’Hare went on. ‘He had money on him, but no identification, no credit cards, nothing. And we have no address for him, just his DNA on file from when he was a cop – oh, yes, he’s ex-job. Based at Shawlands, Southside, never got further than constable.’
‘Ex-cop? Dead ex-cop?’ murmured Anderson, thinking of Carruthers. Dead at sixty-eight. ‘What age was he? And what year did he graduate?’
‘I know I’m good but I’m not that good.’
After her very formal but totally uninformative meeting with Mr Ellis the Warden, Costello had spent a whole hour Rhona free. She had used the time walking once round the buildings that comprised the school – from the grandeur of the old house to the modern technology block and the games hall built into the side of the hill. It had been well done; new trees had been planted to screen the walls of the new buildings and, where possible, the old walls of the original gardens screened the paths and walkways.
It was very pretty.
She saw the Three Graces sitting on the wall above the formal garden. With their youth, beauty and assurance they were everything a man could wish for. Each was exquisite in her own way, but all three, together, would turn heads – women’s as well as men’s – wherever they went.
Costello wondered if she could get out her phone, take a covert photo and send it back to the boys at the lecture room – see if the girls were on some system somewhere. But it was not legal, she cursed silently. And anyway, there was no mobile phone signal.
Saskia moved off the wall, and the other two followed. Costello had a notion to take them down to the old station at Partickhill for an hour or so. Ten minutes in an interview room still rank with the stench of last night’s vomiting drunks might just take the edge off their lovely lives.
She thought about following them but went up to look at the old house instead. Inside the main hall, as Costello walked up the huge stairway, feet almost bouncing on the thick red carpet, she realized she was feeling better. She smiled at a dusty portrait of some tartan-clad Jacobite that hung high above her head. If she could get some mobile reception, she would phone Anderson and find out the progress on the body in the wood.
She took in the view from an upstairs window … it would be very easy to get around unseen.
Costello returned to the garden and sat on the wall, watching the pupils come and go. The older they got, the more relaxed the dress code seemed to be from the blue-and-black tartan mix. But then, it was the second last day of term, and it was all winding down. She was deliberately eavesdropping on two boys looking forward to seeing their parents at the party on Sunday. One had a painting in the exhibition, and he would be guiding some parents round it. He was nervous and excited.
‘Oh, hello!’ It was Rhona again, popping out from behind a pillar as if she had been lying in wait. ‘I know you can’t tell me what Mr Ellis said, but I’ve found him! I thought you might want to come and see him, and do an assessment or something.’
Costello had already surmised that Rhona was off on a wrong track somewhere, but decided to go along with it, secretly enjoying the fact that there might be more than a few problem pupils kicking about the school. Rhona was adept at walking and talking, though not really saying much that made sense, just a constant stream of vagueness. They went back down to the main hall on the way to the front door. More dusty portraits of the family that had originally built the house hung on the walls, and a huge table stood in the middle of the hall, covered with brown envelopes and a neat stack of newspapers.
They went across the gravel at the front of the house, and down the steps to the lower garden, where a few pupils were lolling around on their mid-morning break.
‘There he is,’ said Rhona, pointing.
‘OK,’ said Costello. ‘Let’s keep walking. Don’t make it obvious we’re looking at anybody.’ She followed Rhona along the creeper-hung wall below the balustrade. ‘Who am I looking at exactly?’
But even as the words left her mouth, she knew. An extremely thin young man, about sixteen or seventeen years old, was standing in the hot glare of the sun, wearing a full-length leather coat, dark glasses and black jeans. His long black hair had obviously been dyed, and he was attempting to grow a beard. He was talking to himself, reciting something that Costello couldn’t hear, probably a fluent repetition of something he’d learned. There was something about the boy that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. He didn’t seem to be quite of this world.
‘Does he do this often? Do you know what he’s saying?’ she asked.
‘I never get close enough to hear any of it, but he is talking to himself!’ Rhona looked quickly over her shoulder. ‘As you’ve probably been told, it’s this obsession with violence thing – he’s totally obsessed. And not normal stuff …’ She shook her head, unable to find the words.
‘Hardcore?’ offered Costello.
‘His essays are much too explicit, disturbing. He collects images of death, violence, guns, knives, you name it.’
‘Guns?’ asked Costello.
‘Especially guns,’ said Rhona. ‘Photographs, magazines, books. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, to find out if he’s a danger?’
Only to himself thought Costello, wondering what the boy might be on. But all she said was, ‘Mmm.’
‘I really think Drew Elphinstone could turn this school into a new Columbine. All these tragedies start somewhere, you know.’
It seemed an absurd statement to make, in the grounds of a grand stately home, on such a lovely sunny day, yet Costello was in no doubt that Rhona McMillan believed every word she was saying.
Skelpie Fairbairn sat in a corner at the ABode Hotel, thinking to himself that the beer was expensive, the food was bloody expensive, and the women were far too fucking expensive. Made-up, dressed up, and stuck up, they would smile at him, maybe even exchange a few words, and then they would back away. Nothing specific, just a vague indication that they didn’t fancy him. To his left, two guys were eating a huge pile of onion rings at a posh hotel, and two burgers each. He’d tried giving them a wee smile, even tried to pass a comment when the food came: ‘You’re never going to get through that lot before closing time.’ They’d smiled politely, acknowledging his little joke, then the closest one had slightly turned his back, striking up a quiet conversation with his pal, cutting Skelpie out swiftly and completely.
Things had not changed.
He got up, nodding goodbye to the onion-ring eaters. They didn’t acknowledge it. He walked up on to Byres Road, thinking about going back to the flat in Dumbarton Road; he was keeping to the west side of the city, north of the river, away from his previous hunting ground. It was high time he moved on, as too many people knew where he was. He hoped, when the codeword came, he’d be moved up to the Highland Glen Hotel, where he could be really anonymous.
He did fully intend to turn right towards Dumbarton Road but something made him go north, up into the Great Western Road, towards the hotel, telling himself he was just checking it out, but he recognized that twitch in his subconscious, as if something feral had been woken in him. Something had registered, something on his radar. He slowed down, taking his time. After all, he was just a guy strolling along, enjoying the weather. He scanned the pavement like a cat sensing an injured bird. Then he saw her. She was standing on her own outside the big greengrocer’s shop with its wares piled in baskets all over the pavement, highly polished fruit on one side, pristine clean vegetables on the other. A queue of customers snaked past buckets of flowers and decorative greenery, but she was leaning against a wall to one side – waiting for her mother? He guessed she’d be ten or eleven now. She was wearing jeans, and a white T-shirt with short sleeves rolled up to her shoulders, and sunglasses pushed up to pin back her short, light brown hair. Suddenly she looked up from the game she was playing on her mobile phone, as if aware of his scrutiny.
He would have known her anywhere. He whispered her name to himself.
He had served time for her. Lynda Osbourne.
But he kept walking, and found himself right up at the top of the road by the corner at the Botanics. He could see Kirklee Terrace from here, where Helena McAlpine, wife of the bastard cop, lived. He decided he could do with a walk; it would do him good.
Lambie practised the conversation in his mind, working out each response that Mary might give. He took a deep breath and picked up the phone. She was so long in answering it, he nearly gave up.
‘Mrs Carruthers, I’m sorry to bother you, I know this is a difficult time for you …’
The others could hear a chit-chat answer down the phone.
‘Can I just ask you if your husband knew a William Andrew MacFadyean? … Oh yes. They met at the police college, did they? We know that they shared a fair bit of time working at Partick.’ Lambie gave Anderson the thumbs up. ‘No, don’t you go upsetting yourself, Mrs Carruthers.’ Lambie’s tone changed, and he pulled the receiver closer to his ear. ‘I’m afraid Mr MacFadyean has passed away, yes. I wasn’t at Tommy’s funeral but Wullie was, wasn’t he?’ He frowned as the voice at the other end chattered on. ‘Mrs Carruthers, did Tommy keep a diary?’ He was confident he knew the answer to that one. ‘Really? Do you think I could have a look at them? … Yes, they might be useful … Yes, I appreciate that. And one other thing, did your husband ever go near Glen Fruin? … No? It means nothing to you? … OK, thank you, Mrs Carruthers.’ He put down the phone. ‘Well, well, well.’
‘Have you just played a hunch that has come off?’
‘I don’t think she was totally surprised that Wullie MacFadyean is dead. Carruthers and MacFadyean knew each other, and they were killed within fourteen days of each other. Carruthers was fretting about something.’ He tapped his desk with the nib of his pen. ‘But she is happy for me to look at the diaries. I think that might be very enlightening.’
Anderson had spent the last hour going through the paperwork Howlett had given him. He was getting very uneasy about all this. He was telling himself that one murderer was just like another. The end result was the same. But the thought that they might be on the trail of anything international in general, and Russian in specific, made him feel very out his depth. He had no specialist training in or knowledge of any of this. He dropped his head down, letting his forehead lean on a pile of dirty brown files.
‘Is it that bad, sir? I think you just need some sleep,’ said Lambie.
‘I think we are getting caught in the middle of something here. Let’s have a review,’ said Anderson as Mulholland appeared with a tray of hot coffee. ‘For a start, we need a brief history of how Biggart got to be where he was. From the early 1900s – the good old days, some might call them – two families controlled the east and north of Glasgow. By the time we get to the 1980s, things are getting serious, big drugs are moving in, but the O’Donnells and the McGregors are still very much in charge. Over the years they seem to have done a good job of killing each other off. Often with a private joke about killing each other by shooting into various body orifices. They never, ever went for cutting people open up the middle of the ribcage. That is a trick of the Russian mafia. Are we agreed so far?’
Lambie and Mulholland both nodded.
‘But,’ said Anderson, ‘by the end of 1996 all that had gone.’
‘The time of the Marchetti kidnap? Which Moffat was in charge of.’
‘And that’s when the Russian mafia appear on the scene.’ Anderson rubbed the tiredness from his eyes. ‘That’s the theme of all this. Companies being bought by companies who are owned by companies with Russian directors. At the bottom line, they buy taxi companies, sunbed salons and sandwich bars.’
‘Money laundering, then,’ said Lambie. ‘And cutting people open sounds more like them. Eagles, double eagles.’
‘You sound like a golfer,’ muttered Mulholland.
Anderson ignored him; his heart was sinking. ‘Do you also think that human trafficking sounds like them?’
‘You’d be naive to think it doesn’t. People are cheap currency nowadays. Kids even more so. You can buy a kid in the Ukraine for a few hundred, worth thousands over here,’ said Mulholland. ‘And where there is money to be made, organized crime follows.’
‘But I always thought the Glasgow gangs were just a bunch of thugs that went about demanding money with menaces from little old ladies,’ Lambie said, shrugging slightly.
‘That would have got you a stab, if you’d hit a little old lady. They’d rob a post office or nick your car, but not the little old lady thing. Ice cream vans, scrap yards, selling stolen goods at the Barras, that was their sort of game.’
‘Very moral of them,’ muttered Anderson. ‘Eric Moffat is mentioned in this file at an incident Costello attended as a proby, in the city centre. It’s kind of passed into folklore but there was, according to this, a meeting between the McGregors and the O’Donnells – well, the women. They had each had nearly everybody important to them killed by the family of the other. Pauline McGregor had lost her husband and both brothers, and Mo O’Donnell, who was married to Auld Archie, had lost two sons and the third was in the Bar-L. They agreed that the two families would stop fighting between themselves, and keep each to their own territory. The theory was that they were thinking it was the only way to stay strong, to stop the Russians moving in.’
‘Didn’t work, though, did it?’
‘Somebody must have really wanted it not to happen. Pauline was fatally stabbed in the car park coming away from that meeting. She was pregnant. No one ever stood trial for it but Archie – Wee Archie, I mean – was later convicted of chopping the head off one of his own people. Don’t know if they ever got the guy who actually stabbed Pauline, though.’
‘Why? If they were on opposite sides, why should it matter to the O’Donnells who killed Pauline?’
‘Outwith the code? Punishment for acting without authority? Who knows? But after that there were a couple of years of peace. Either they’d listened to their women, or they’d simply run out of men. Everything was quiet for a while. We didn’t know that at the time, of course. But with hindsight, that’s when it all started to quieten down. Post 1996, post Alessandro Marchetti’s disappearance, all hell broke loose, each family accusing the other of kidnapping the kid to make them look bad. In the end, both families fell apart.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Lambie, intrigued. ‘Surely over the years somebody has come forward? Somebody must have said something.’
‘It’s the sheer silence, the lack of concrete evidence that suggests it was one of them. Only gang families like that can make people look the other way for such a long period of time. But nobody admits anything. Nobody … total silence. If somebody had a shred of solid evidence, it would be out by now.’
‘So, nobody has ever really known who was behind the abduction of the boy? But whoever it was, they had the organizational skills to take a kid – that was a whole new ball game.’
‘It was a cool hard snatch. In and out,’ Anderson observed. ‘There’d be problems keeping the child and the babysitter in a safe place, and you could argue that only an organized crime family had the means to do that. But then again, they’d certainly never done anything like it before, either lot. They were a bunch of thugs, yes, but they had brains. The bit that doesn’t fit is that neither the boy nor the babysitter were returned. And, despite what Simone Sangster says, no ransom was ever asked for. Either family would have fulfilled their part of the bargain, if a bargain had been made. Because it was business. If they’d taken the money and not returned the child, there’d be no point in doing it again, would there?’
‘So, what age is Archie O’Donnell now? Is he still alive?’
‘He’d be an old man, if so.’
‘I’d really like to know what they’re up to now, in 2010. Those who are left.’
‘Eric Moffat might know. He was at the sharp end of the police investigation into the families for five years – the years that saw their decline.’
‘I think he was even shot at by Archie O’Donnell once,’ said Lambie with some delight. ‘But don’t start him on that story, or you’ll never get away.’
Anderson was trying to resist the temptation to make the Marchetti case active. He could only justify it if there was a stronger link than Moffat being in charge. But, as much as he liked Dino and felt desperately sorry for Maria, he couldn’t do it. As soon as the Bridge Boy’s DNA came back, and the findings had been communicated to the Marchettis, that would be that.
The report on Melinda Biggart’s finances had come in and been sent off to the fraud squad accountants. They’d had money, those two – it seemed crime did pay – but the initial consensus view was that Mrs Biggart was hiding nothing from her husband. Well, nothing financial, at any rate.
‘Can I talk to you a minute?’ said a familiar voice, and he looked up to see Helena McAlpine standing in front of his desk. She gave a little sideways glance around the lecture theatre. ‘In private?’
Anderson stood up. ‘Those were the days, when I had an office of my own. Or I could borrow my boss’s.’
‘Indeed, those were the days.’ She said it cheerily enough, but did not move.
Anderson dearly wished she would. But there she was, still with that same smile, and that same scent of Penhaligon’s Bluebell – mingled with the aroma of turps or brush cleaner, or whatever it was. And his heart sank. That was the thing about Helena McAlpine – the world around her seemed to change, but she herself stayed the same. Today she was wearing stonewashed jeans and a blue-and-white striped T-shirt. She had not tanned in the summer sun; her freckles had just joined up a little more.
‘We could go out to the canteen,’ he offered.
‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. But still she did not move.
‘You got your car?’
‘It’s across the road.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
It was a hot afternoon with close airless weather. The wind was stuck elsewhere in the glen; Costello felt the sweat run down the back of her neck, and the skin of her face was moist. The midges were gathering in bundles, sensing that the temperature was ready to drop as the evening approached. Costello sat on the wall at the balustrade, her stomach full with salmon and boiled new potatoes followed by cheesecake. And tea in a cup with a saucer. Howlett had been right, the food here was lovely. She was pretending she was working, listening to the noises around her – gentle noises caught in the summer air. Some pupils were playing tennis, the hollow thump, thump of the ball hitting the dry grass. They scored badly. A fun game. Their friends lay on the low banks of grass that surrounded the courts.
More extracurricular art seemed to be going on on the upper lawn. Sketch books out, pencils and pastels scattered at their feet, young talented hands doing lazy sketches. It was idyllic, listening to the noises of people interacting, but not getting involved. She realized how lonely she had been in the flat. She had enjoyed casual chit-chat over lunch about the difficulty of moving kids from class to class, the problems of the old school – which Costello took to mean the original building – and the new school with its classrooms and technical block built into the side of the hill on the north-east side of the old house. Costello’s flat was further to the south. She knew they were subtly complaining about the set-up to her, in her position as somebody who was going to report back on how to make it all better.
She watched the Three Graces strolling together. They went over to sit on the stone bench where several boys gathered at their feet in some kind of subtle migration of the beautiful people.
She had sat there for a while, enjoying the sights and sounds, when she saw the little plump girl Elizabeth walk across the lower path, well away from everybody else. She was not walking quickly but there was something about the way she moved that pricked Costello’s interest. ‘Furtive’ was the word that floated into her mind. And the way she was dressed – the trousers, the long cardigan, the flat shoes. Dressed to be out, not to enjoy the summer afternoon. Costello had been told to watch for anything that sparked her interest, and … she had had her interest sparked.
She looked down, watching the figure walk to the bridge over the stream. Was there a subtle look behind to check that nobody was following her? There was a definite pulling of her hand from her trouser pocket, a flick of the wrist and a quickening of the stroll that was not be as relaxed as it seemed. Costello slid from her place and went slowly down the stone stairs, turning round to look at the house every now and again, impressed by its grandeur as a newcomer should be. But she was subtly watching the figure dressed in black.
Costello paused at the bridge, searching for the path where the girl had gone. The path followed the stream running down to the river. The path and the stream twisted in and out of the old forest to reappear further down the glen – which also meant they twisted in and out of sight, Costello realized. Elizabeth had gone into the older forest which, Costello presumed, was out of bounds – if anything was out of bounds in this place. But she felt like she was trailing a suspect, and she had always been good at that.
Keeping well back, she entered the subdued light of the old oak forest, staying close to the trunks of the massive trees. The air was cool in here, light dappled on the path, highlighting the clouds of buzzing and whirring insects. She walked on, catching glimpses of the girl in front of her each time the path straightened out for a few yards. She kept well behind, pausing only when the main path went to the left up the hill and towards the Forestry Commission land with its regiments of pine trees. Elizabeth had chosen a much smaller, less defined path that seemed to run down towards the river. Costello could hear the water – louder, gently rolling, as if there was a waterfall nearby. The small path had overhanging branches, which meant she had to protect her face, and she wondered how often people passed this way. But Elizabeth knew where was going, confidently climbing over a fence that had the top wire bent for easier access. There was a sign in faded paint, warning politely that they were now leaving school premises and giving a list of warnings about what might happen to them in the big bad world outside.
Costello followed her over the fence, still keeping her distance, then moved on and trailed her for a good five minutes. She kept looking at her watch in case she was losing her sense of direction in the middle of the trees, thinking back to Hansel and Gretel. There was the sound of a waterfall – not a big one but a gentle ongoing rumble of slow water. Here it may not rain for years and yet the river would still flow, the water draining down from springs high in the hills. She paused, instinct telling her that Elizabeth had stopped. The girl was crossing the river on some stepping stones, arms out for balance, heading for a slight clearing on the far side. Costello hid behind the trunk of a large tree, its bark rough to the skin of her hands and face as she leaned her face against it. She was soaked with sweat as she got her breath back and watched.
Then Elizabeth seemed to look around her, waiting or watching for something. Her dealer? Was this what Howlett had been talking about? The girl turned to look back in Costello’s direction. She withdrew, her back to the tree and waited. Nothing. She looked out again; Elizabeth had moved along the path a few feet and was kicking something with her shoes – some dead pulled grass covering a small hole that had been dug in the ground. She muttered something as she kicked the grass away. It sounded like ‘fucking maddie’ or ‘fucking saddoe’.
She seemed infuriated by this, and raised her voice, calling out with her face turned away from Costello so she only heard the end of the word … the ‘ewe’.
Was she calling for Drew? The fucking maddie?
Elizabeth spun round, calling again. Then she screamed and stumbled back. Costello stepped out on to the path to see the girl rolling on the ground, holding her ankle. Elizabeth was in agony.
Costello ran towards her, nimbly jumping over the stepping stones, getting her toes wet. ‘God, what happened to you?’
The girl looked up in surprise – mild surprise, she had expected somebody but not Costello. ‘I fell down that fuckin’ hole, didn’t ah, went right over on ma ankle.’
Costello was now close enough to see the black-lined eyes and the pockmarked skin that was almost white with make-up. On the ground the girl looked like a bad clown. She knelt down to look; a spike of wood had gone through the girl’s trouser leg and the sock and had broken the surface of her skin badly, in a dot-dot-dash-dash pattern. Even as Costello watched, it started to bleed.
‘Where did you spring from?’ asked Elizabeth, recovering her Glen Fruin accent.
‘I was exploring that wee path. I thought you had gone up the other way – sorry if I frightened you.’ She leaned over to help the girl up.
Did she imagine that Elizabeth looked into the forest, worried that whoever she was expecting might appear? Drew? Her dealer? Was she expecting to score? And just for herself?
Then Costello looked behind her to the two perfect holes cut into the earth, the second one filled with pieces of cut wood, sharpened to spikes and stuck into the earth to remain upright. ‘Bloody hell! What on earth is that – a trap of some kind?’
‘Bugger if I know, but I fell right into it.’
‘But that first one was badly disguised – so you walked round it, almost forcing you to step right into this one.’ She knelt down. ‘This one was well disguised and –’ Her attention was caught by a movement in the trees, somebody in black, darting from the cover of one tree to another. ‘Did you see that?’
‘Who?’
Who?
Elizabeth sounded scared, and just for a minute Costello realized how young she was. ‘Nothing, just the shadows playing tricks on my eyes … Let’s get you up, the damage seems to be only skin deep. Hop to that tree and see if you can stand on that ankle.’
As she gave Elizabeth some support, the young girl swore. Costello was aware of the constant rumble of the water; she was able to talk to her companion at close quarters but it would be hard to hear anybody creeping around. She looked back at the two small pits, each a perfect rectangle, and noticed the way they were lined up. She looked around her – at the trees and the dark, deep forest.
She registered the feeling that they were being watched, something dark moving in the trees alongside them.
Something to report.
‘Come on, let’s get back. Just lean on my arm.’
The girl did so, holding tighter than was necessary.
‘So, why were you down here? It was a bit of a trek.’
‘Why were you?’ came the easy reply.
When he first got into the Beamer, balancing coffee in a tray, Anderson tried to press the switch to roll down the window.
‘Well, you can do that if you want,’ said Helena dryly, turning down an opera aria on the CD. ‘Or we could put the air con on.’
He laughed. ‘I’ve been demoted to a Jazz, remember?’
‘I know. Bad days.’
Anderson took a sip of coffee, and felt himself relaxing as a cool refreshing draught came through the air-conditioning vent. ‘So, what do you want?’
Her fingers curled round the steering wheel. ‘Colin, I need to know the truth. About Alan. Was he bent?’
Anderson’s head jerked round. ‘Alan? Bent? No! He was a good copper; he was DCI at – what – thirty-eight? Alan never did a bent thing in his entire career! Or do you think Fairbairn was innocent? Because he wasn’t, he was guilty. Some lawyer’s making a play of the new disclosure law, that’s all. And no, again, Alan was not bent.’
‘And you would know.’
‘Yes, I would,’ he answered without hesitating. ‘OK, I don’t have proof, but I don’t need any. Full stop.’
‘Not a single doubt in your mind?’
‘Not an iota. Alan was too much of an upfront in-your-face little shite to be taking any backhanders. He might go to bed with the bad guys but he’d tell everybody about it. Not orthodox, but not illegal.’
Helena bit her lip and nodded. ‘It’s just, with this Fairbairn business, people have started talking. Denise said –’
‘She would. She’s another criminal lawyer, and a man-hater.’
‘She happens to be my best friend.’
‘If she was your best friend, she wouldn’t be talking shite about your late husband.’
‘I guess not,’ Helena said quietly.
‘The fact that she’s Terry Gilfillan’s sister might have something to do with it.’
Anderson watched her face. There was no reaction to Gilfillan’s name, no hasty, ‘Oh, I meant to tell you, we’re getting married.’ He wondered what it would be like to go out to dinner with Helena, properly. He lifted his coffee to his mouth, thinking about how to phrase an invitation, to make it sound casual …
‘There’s something else,’ Helena said after a while.
‘Yes?’ He was grateful that she had interrupted. Better that than hear her say no.
‘I think somebody is watching me. I’m not imagining it.’
‘I’m sure you aren’t.’
‘I think it’s Fairbairn. I’ve seen him three times now, on the grass up at the terrace, and in the street outside the gallery. But it was when I saw him yesterday, outside the gallery again, that I realized he wasn’t just somebody out in the street having a fag; he was following me. He does this little trick, flipping the lighter before he lights up – I remember Alan trying to do it.’ She spanned her fingers, palm down, jerked her hand palm up then closed her fingers. ‘And it dawned on me who it was. It is him.’
‘OK, I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Apart from the fact that Alan arrested him – you’re sure there’s nothing else?’
‘If there was, I would tell you.’
‘So, it might just be coincidence. Even if it isn’t, I can look after myself.’
‘And can I ask you – did Alan ever have a working relationship with either Archie O’Donnell or any of the McGregors?’
Helena ran her fingers through her hair, checking it in the rear-view mirror. Then she looked directly at Anderson, the significance of his question sinking in. She was offended. ‘He wasn’t on the take from them or anybody else. I’m surprised you have to ask that.’
‘It’s not what I meant. Top cops, organized crime. There’s often a subtle relationship. That’s all.’ He realized his hand had slid on top of hers. He removed it.
‘It’s a long time ago, Colin. I know Alan thought William McGregor was as tricksy as a box of monkeys. He did meet Archie O’Donnell a few times. This is Glasgow and I’m not naive enough to think there wasn’t a sectarian side to that.’
‘O’Donnell would talk to a Catholic cop if he wanted to talk to a cop at all,’ agreed Anderson.
‘And I think there was a degree of mutual respect, if that’s what you mean.’
Anderson nodded and sighed. It was bloody hot in the car. ‘Talking of Terry …’ He turned to Helena.
‘Which we weren’t.’
‘You never told me you were engaged.’ By some miracle his voice sounded quite normal, even congratulatory.
Helena levelled the rear-view mirror with her fingertip. ‘I’m not sure that I am.’
Anderson couldn’t help feeling as if a knife had been stuck in his stomach.
She smiled at him. ‘I remember Terry asking me to marry him, but I do not remember giving him an answer. I certainly didn’t say yes. Where does this come from?’
‘I just heard a rumour.’
‘And you were annoyed that I hadn’t told you?’ She smiled that rather mocking smile. ‘That’s rather touching.’
‘But none of my business.’
‘No, it’s not really, is it?’ She placed her hand on the back of his. ‘But there’s something that is. You were the next most senior investigating officer in Fairbairn’s case, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how long do you think it’ll take Fairbairn to figure out that the girl who comes to the gallery to show me her pictures is your daughter?’
‘Elizabeth? Are you OK?’ asked Costello as her companion slumped on to the wall at the far side of the school garden.
‘Please don’t call me that, I’m not the friggin’ queen. It’s Libby, and I’m going to stop for a fag before we go any further. I know you won’t tell.’
Costello frowned slightly. ‘And how do you know I won’t tell?’
‘Because you think they’re a bunch of wankers. I can tell. Fag?’ Libby Hamilton slumped to the ground and pulled her trousers up above her knee, laying plump white legs bare to the sun, exposing the angry red dash on her calf. ‘It must be some kind of curse, to have such dark hair and not tan. Why is that?’
‘Curse of the Celt, I think – or is it the Bretons? There’s one lot that have dark hair and blue eyes and don’t tan.’ Costello sat down beside her, drawing her knees up and closing her eyes. The light of the sun made the veins dance in her eyelids. She could smell Libby’s cigarette smoke wafting across her face. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked again.
‘Of course.’ There was an unconscious wipe of the thumb under her eyes, as if to remove any sign that she had been crying. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I’m casing the joint,’ Costello said, half in jest.
‘I don’t think that’s so far from the truth,’ said Libby with a total lack of humour. ‘You struck gold with a body on your first night.’
‘Could have done without that. So, do you like it here?’
‘As I have no experience of any other type of school, I can’t really say.’ There was the sound of a quiet kiss as Libby took the cigarette in her lips and drew hard. ‘As prisons go, this is nice enough. Warm, great food, and the company is endlessly amusing. But none of it’s real. Like you.’ She flicked her cigarette ash with some anger.
‘Like me?’
‘You’re real; you don’t belong here. And the fact that you’re real means that you are, by definition, fake. Like finding a sane person in a lunatic asylum – they must be there for a reason.’ She let out a long plume of cigarette smoke. ‘The staff view you with some suspicion, yet you’re not a school inspector – if you were, you’d have had a fit the minute I lit up. And I’ve seen you bite your lip at a few things.’
‘At people who don’t need mortgages because they inherit?’ Costello mused.
The rear wheels of an approaching car spun up some grit from the drive, which bounced across the lawn like hail. The gardener stood upright from his wheelbarrow and lifted out a rake. ‘Bet his language is choice.’ Libby moved along the stone wall a little and turned to look at Costello. ‘Anyway, why are you prowling around like Miss Marple in the midnight garden? Looking for clues?’
‘It seems a very lax kind of place. I thought it would be more regimented,’ said Costello, standing up as the chill of the stone started to eat through her trousers.
‘Yes, but it’s a business,’ Libby said baldly. ‘They have to give us a certain degree of freedom or everyone would just tell Mummy and Daddy that they don’t want to be here. And for all he’ll huff and puff, the Gruppenführer knows that. It’s not a good school in the sense that it turns out geniuses – academically it just scrapes through inspections, though they say it used to be good – but it does have its advantages.’
‘Like what?’
‘It’s near the airport.’ Libby smiled at her little joke. ‘And the cheesecake is good.’
The minute David Lambie appeared on the landing where Mary Carruthers lived, Rene came beetling out from her door, practically helping him press the doorbell, repeating, ‘Oh, you’re back again already. Mary will be pleased …’
When Mary opened the door she didn’t seem pleased to see her sister, but she dutifully replayed the same routine with the tray and the tea, saying nothing about the money. She watched as Rene took an empty cup off the tray and sat down with it. Mary took it back and placed it on the tray, shaking her head. ‘She picks up everything and moves things around. Teapot in the fridge, my glasses in the bin.’
Lambie’s eyes were fixed on the diaries, which had all been stacked neatly. There was a used envelope stuck between 1976 and 1978 – that meant there was one missing. Lambie wondered if that made it all the more important.
‘Wullie MacFadyean?’ Mary said, once Rene had settled down and Lambie could get a word in edgeways to ask her. ‘Oh, I don’t recall much about him. Quite a shock to see him at the funeral.’ She was trying to hold back the tears, while Rene nibbled away at a scone like a demented rabbit, smiling eagerly at Lambie, who just smiled back.
‘You know Wullie left his first wife,’ Mary went on, ‘and he got married again, to a girl who worked at the station – a high-up cop, well promoted, you know. I can’t remember what she was called, but she had a strange job. I think there was a bit of an age difference. Tommy didn’t approve of that kind of thing. Wullie was sent to Shawlands, and Tommy stayed at Partick. He liked it there.’
‘Would you happen to have a photograph of Wullie, even an old one?’ Lambie asked. Wullie’s face hadn’t been that much use for ID, not after the crows had finished with him.
‘There was one of them all out on the hills. I saw it recently, but …’ she shook her head, thinking.
Lambie didn’t want to pressurize her but his big problem was that nobody seemed to know where Wullie lived. They were trawling all the MacFadyeans on the electoral roll and the council tax register, and hoping that somebody, at some point, would report him missing. The ex-cop had been dead for twenty-four hours now and it was as if nobody had noticed.
‘You don’t know if he was still married?’
‘I wouldn’t know, son. I think he was on his own yesterday. But I wasn’t paying attention.’
Lambie found himself trying with difficulty to follow what Mary was saying. Rene kept butting in, asking him something about the old Co-op bakery and telling him she’d got the scones there that morning.
‘Doubt it,’ muttered Mary. ‘It was knocked down forty years ago.’
But Rene was nibbling again, and saying, ‘I said to Mary but she didn’t understand. Well, she did, but she has a lot on her plate – you know, planting your man, it’s not easy – so maybe she didn’t. Or if she did, I don’t think she found it –’
‘Found what?’
‘The photograph of the boys, the boys that all went hill-walking that time. You know the one? The one the man was asking for.’
Crystal clear. Lambie looked at Mary, who slowly shook her head.
‘What do you mean, Rene? What man?’ Mary stood up and went over to the far side of the room, her face deathly pale. Lambie watched her carefully as Rene kept talking.
‘You see, the man was asking for it, and she – her there – said she didn’t have it, and I know that she did have it because I’ve seen it. When that other girl –’
Mary shook her head, finally understanding. ‘Sorry, Mr Lambie. She’s thinking about the girl who wrote that book. She came round last year or the year before – you know, the way they do – wanting to speak to Tommy about the Marchetti kidnap case, but he had had nothing to do with it. But she kept on and on, as if he had. It upset him, mind you.’ Then, briskly, ‘But that’s what Rene is thinking about. It’s in the papers again, and it’s reminding her, that’s all.’
Lambie nodded. ‘So, Rene, who was asking about the photograph?’ he asked gently.
‘That man at the funeral, the man who came up in the lift with me, with the gloves.’ Rene dunted Lambie heavily in the ribs with her elbow. ‘I mean, gloves! I think he was a bit simple, but who would have gloves on, on the warmest day of the year? That’s what I said to him, and he laughed. He was nice looking, though. Just like that man on the telly. You know the one – Michael Aspel!’
‘Do you know this man?’ Lambie looked from one sister to the other.
‘I’ve no idea who she’s talking about.’ Mary shrugged. ‘I mean, there is an old picture somewhere. It’s normally with the diaries but it’s not there now.’ She wiped a tear from her cheek, and sat down. ‘Tommy, Eric Moffat, Wullie MacFadyean and – oh, who were those other two now? Graham … ? Graham Hunter and Jason Purcie. They all used to go hill-walking, camping, when they were younger.’
Lambie reassured her. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t that important,’ he lied. Mary was an old woman, she was upset, so he let the silence lie.
She twisted her hanky in her fingers and went on. ‘You know, when Tommy died, I was going through his things, and I checked all the diaries, to make sure they were in order. There’s one missing. He wrote his diary every day until a couple of years ago. Now, his life’s not complete …’ The tears were threatening to start again.
He turned his attention to Rene, and asked her the most important question. ‘And when did you meet the man in the lift, Rene? The man who was at the funeral? Was it the day of the funeral?’
‘Oh no, it was the day Tommy died, the day I’d been to the hospital, with my knees.’
‘And when did you get back?’
Rene lowered her voice melodramatically. ‘Not until after – you know …’ She nodded, so Lambie would understand.
‘She didn’t get back until the afternoon,’ said Mary. ‘One of the neighbours took her in. Told her, gave her a cup of tea.’
At that point, Mary composed herself and relaxed into the sofa, her face still pale. This was obviously news to her. Slowly she began to question her sister. There had been a man in the lift on the day of Tommy’s suicide who had also been at the funeral. The man had asked her about a photograph of Tommy Carruthers out hill-walking with his friend Wullie MacFadyean.
‘Can we rely on what she is saying?’ asked Lambie out of the side of his mouth.
Mary nodded her head, still confused. ‘She must be right. She wouldn’t make that up.’ She ran her fingers through her hair.
Lambie waited for her to think it through.
‘She would have got the hospital bus back. It drops her at the rear of the building, so she’d have come in that door. There’s a small lift back there, near the stairs, but people don’t use it much. Everybody uses the lifts at the front.’ She cupped her fingers over her mouth. ‘Was there somebody here? A man who knew my husband?’ She looked at Lambie, reddened eyes full of confusion.
Lambie stood up, and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll find out if he was here, don’t worry.’
A few uninterrupted hours with the CCTV footage and a strong coffee, and they might know exactly who ‘he’ was.
Ex-DCI Eric Moffat was not totally happy to meet at the station; he asked Anderson to come up to the Lodge On The Loch, a hotel by the side of Loch Lomond. ‘We can have a full and frank conversation, totally off the record, and well away from prying eyes and ears,’ he said. ‘Anything else, you can simply ascertain by calling up the old records on the computer.’
Anderson could imagine a cold beer in the early evening sun, by the lochside, with the sun glinting off the water, Ben Lomond in the distance. He was sure he could think of better ways of spending a Thursday evening if he tried – but, apart from dinner with Helena McAlpine, nothing jumped to mind. What he hoped to get was the situation surrounding Biggart, warts and all.
When he arrived, Moffat was already there and had commandeered a table outside. They ordered a couple of pints from a waitress, and sat in silence as the Maid of the Loch steamed past, full of holidaymakers. Moffat was looking hot, and the dry flakes of a previous sunburn were still apparent round his receding hairline. The tan was obviously coming at a price.
‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ said Anderson, ‘how the hell do you survive in Australia? Do you not just burn up all the time?’
Moffat shook his head, downing a gulp of beer. ‘That’s the thing about Australians – they know about the sun and they know how to deal with it. They’re prepared. My grandchildren never go out without their factor thirty and a sun hat. Everywhere they go there’s air con. It’s a healthy life. My daughter, Carolyn, had really bad asthma as a kid, on steroids all the time. One of the reasons they went out. She’s not had an attack all the time they’ve been there. Scotland is a splendid country, but God knows the weather is shite.’ Moffat raised his beer glass to the ben, looming at the head of the loch.
Anderson let his eyes flit across the water. ‘If the weather was like Australia, this place would look like a desert,’ he said. ‘So, your daughter went out before you did?’
‘Yeah, I stayed to finish my time in the force. The minute I’d done my thirty, I was out there.’ Moffat drained his beer. ‘But I guess it’s different for you, being a bit younger.’
‘And the kids not yet at exam age. But we might be better going now, while they still have a couple of years to fit into the Australian system.’
‘With us it was no contest. Carolyn was ill, so she went. Then my wife followed, just for the summer. Then that turned out to be permanent. The minute they landed in Brissie, Carolyn’s lungs lost their sensitivity. The air’s warm and dry, not this damp muck we breathe. She has a good job, rather than the life of an invalid she would have had here. But both my boys married Glasgow lassies and refused to follow us out. They’re both on the force in Glasgow – Callum and Johnnie – doing well. You got your promotion yet, by the way?’
‘Yes. But I’m not totally sure what I’m chief of.’
‘I think Howlett’s keeping you for something special. LOCUST, maybe?’
‘I think he might have something on his mind.’ Anderson recalled what Howlett had said about saying little and listening a lot.
‘So, nobody’s mentioned it by name. It’s supposed to be a new initiative to clean up the streets of Glasgow. But if they weren’t thinking of you for it, they wouldn’t have asked me to meet you. I always reasoned that the one they sent to speak to me would be the one heading up the new team.’ Moffat settled back, comfortable with his audience. ‘So, for now, officially, you are working on the Biggart case. While shielding your back about the Fairbairn case, and trying to forget the fact that an abused minor died in your arms. Tough one.’
‘It is when you put it like that.’ Anderson was beginning to find Moffat’s charm wearing thin. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
Moffat tipped his sunglasses with his forefinger, studying the photograph Anderson was sliding towards him. ‘Is that the tattoo on the van driver?’
‘The passenger – yes.’
‘Do you know what it means?’
Anderson waited.
‘It means trouble,’ Moffat said quietly. ‘It means he’s done time in a Russian prison. If he has more tattoos on his upper arm, black wavy lines, then that means big trouble. The lines represent crows in flight. One crow means one kill. Three crows, and they’re allowed to prove themselves with a blood eagle.’ He didn’t elaborate. ‘These guys are not playing peek-a-boo, Colin.’
‘A blood eagle?’ A vision floated into Anderson’s mind – taut arms, splayed ribs. Blood … ‘What does that mean?’ he asked evenly, drawing Moffat out.
‘It’s a rite of passage,’ Moffat explained. ‘It’s like a promotion, a graduation.’
‘Who for?’
‘The Russian mafia, of course.’ Moffat downed half his pint.
‘So, the guy with the barbed-wire bracelet would be in our system?’
‘No, he would be in the Russian prison system,’ said Moffat impatiently. ‘They view time served as a matter of pride, hence the visibility of the tattoos. Biggart had a tattoo on the biceps of his left arm, didn’t he?’ He was making a connection.
‘Did he?’ Anderson was surprised, then remembered that O’Hare had found traces of one, deep in the skin.
‘You didn’t know?’
‘He was burned to a crisp.’ He sipped his pint, eyes on the photograph, wondering who had blabbed. ‘To tell you the truth, I’d much rather get after the bastard who did for the girl. ACC Howlett seems to think that you might be able to shine some light on it all.’
‘I can give you some background. The thing is, nobody really knows how Biggart got where he did. He used to be so low on the O’Donnell family totem pole that they’d only use him to wipe their arses if there was no sandpaper left. He was not a clever man –’ Moffat drained his glass ‘– but he was crafty, certainly crafty enough to always be one step ahead of us.’
‘Background, you said?’
‘Well, he used to run with the O’Donnell family, like I said. Wee Archie O’Donnell in particular. But once the Marchetti boy was taken, and they were all at each other’s throats, we had the upper hand, and the rest is history. Wee Archie’d be in his forties now, maybe a bit older. He’s doing life in the Bar-L for taking somebody’s head off with a machete, so he’s not likely to get out any time soon.’ Moffat smiled. ‘Those days produced a stream of intelligence for us. People found the nerve to step forward, and there was a secret information amnesty, if you like. We just picked them up and locked them up. The families were never hugely into drugs – that was a cultural thing – but there was an outbreak of the usual fighting for territory, and that caused the great heroin drought of 1999 to 2000. Prices were going through the roof. Biggart found a supply and moved into the vacuum. Quickly. So, one minute he was a two-bit pimp, and within a couple of years he was the bee’s knees with an endless supply of red heroin.’
‘So, somebody was backing him?’
‘I don’t doubt it. Didn’t doubt it then, don’t doubt it now. Presumably he’d proved his worth. Hence the tattoo. But, at the time, we had no idea what a monster he would turn out to be, did we?’
‘How about Mrs Biggart? She had a close association with a much younger man, apparently. And it’s possible he might have known her husband as well.’
Moffat grinned. ‘Is that a euphemism? If he was a good-looking young man, Biggart may well have known him. Any idea who he was?’ It was a direct question
Anderson said evasively, ‘I think we’ll know by tomorrow. What we don’t know is why Melinda Biggart was killed.’
Moffat waved a cloud of midges from above his head. The heat was starting to wane. ‘In that game, any association is a dangerous one. And there’s another drug drought on now. Somebody is squeezing the supply again. Just look back over the last eight months. You’ve noticed a lot of dealers have been killed or packed up and moved on? A kind of ethnic cleansing of the unclean. Which means somebody is holding on to the supply, so that when the balance tips they’ll be in the driving seat.’
‘And a new king moves in?’
‘Or queen,’ said Moffat. ‘The trouble is, the price drops with the flood. There’s more activity, more chance the cops hear about it and intervene. It all gets messy.’
‘Seems messy either way.’
‘You want another?’ He reached for Anderson’s drained glass.
‘Coke for me, please. I’m driving.’
Moffat got to his feet. ‘All I’m saying is, Colin, always look behind what you see. You’re still on the job, and I don’t expect you to say anything, but if you know, definitely know, of any more dead girls out there, young girls, with any hint that they’re foreign, then we’re talking about human trafficking. Human flesh is good currency nowadays. People will invest a lot in that kind of business. A child can be bought in Nigeria for twenty dollars, and sold over here for thousands. And that means you’re looking at organized crime. Russian, if we consider the evidence of the tattoo.’
‘Yes, we’ve got that far. Is that what LOCUST is being set up for?’
‘That’s the rumour. But no matter what, Special Branch will come along and take it off you, so please don’t think you owe the job too much. Because they won’t think they owe you anything. If it suits them, they’ll throw you to the lions.’
Mick Batten got off the subway train at Hillhead, with a battered leather satchel slung over one shoulder, and an overstuffed rucksack over the other. He liked Glasgow – it reminded him of his Liverpool hometown – and he was starting to feel quite at home here, as if he was coming back to see family he actually liked. He and ACC Howlett had been emailing thoughts and documents backwards and forwards to each other for a couple of weeks now. Batten was a forensic psychologist, not a criminologist, but he could see the bigger picture perfectly well, and Howlett had been impressed – as people often are when somebody else comes along and not only does their job for them, but does it better. Criminal psychology was simple in a case like this. All he had to do was separate the wood from the trees, stand back and take a good look.
He walked down Byres Road, pausing to take his leather jacket off and stuff it in on top of his rucksack. He stopped for a pint of cold beer at the Blind Pig, a pub with an open frontage. Instinctively he held his hand over the satchel – anybody who stole that would be in for a few sleepless nights; when it came to violence Glaswegians made Scousers look like the cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Batten had examined the pictures of the three dead girls – children, he reminded himself – that O’Hare had linked from the post mortem findings. The three live girls represented somebody’s insurance; but the dead children would have netted him pure profit. And more. They could simply have been shot like dogs once they were too beaten and traumatized to be of any further use. Instead, their deaths had been cruel, protracted and deeply disturbing. As they were meant to be. The message would have come across loud and clear: Mess with us, and this is what you get.
And if somebody could waste human resources like that, it meant he had a supply coming from somewhere, and that meant human trafficking.
Batten sipped at his pint. Glasgow and Liverpool: both had a tradition of football, shipbuilding, alcohol and sectarianism. And gangland feuds. Every so often somebody got taken out and the hierarchy readjusted itself. And it was in that period of readjustment, while the lie of the land was changing, that things got dangerous. In the case of Glasgow the dynamic had always been more like shifting tectonic plates; the tension would build up for years and then there would be a massive rumble. Batten knew exactly who was ruling at the moment – the Russian mafia. The ‘Vorony’, as he called them.
The Crows.
But for how long? And who was the pretender to the throne?
Anderson snapped his phone shut and made his way back to the table.
‘Good news?’ asked Moffat, coming back with the drinks.
‘We think we might have a lead on an ID on the Bridge Boy. I’ll be glad when he comes out of his coma and tells us who did that to him.’
Moffat nodded. ‘Good. But what about Melinda Biggart? She was killed by blood eagle.’
Anderson sipped at his Coke, hoping that Moffat wouldn’t dwell too much on the exact details of Mrs Biggart’s demise; he was already feeling queasy at the memory.
But Moffat was well into his stride and not to be stopped. ‘The blood eagle was something the Vikings used to do, only they did it from the back, disarticulating the ribs from the spine and flattening out the ribcage like wings.’ He stretched out his hands in demonstration.
Anderson shut his eyes and swallowed hard.
‘The Russians do it from the front, so the victim looks like the double-headed Romanov eagle. More like a spatchcocked chicken, actually.
‘For each killing, by any method they like, the Russians get a black crow tattoo. Then once they have three black tattoos, they get to do the whole blood eagle thing. Not many men can cut the heart out while it’s still beating, which is what the Vikings did.’
‘Probably against health and safety regs now,’ muttered Anderson. Considerable strength as well as manual dexterity, O’Hare had said.
‘They do it to prove their allegiance, to show they have nerves of steel, that they’re true soldiers. Then they get a red eagle tattoo. And that identifies them as a life member of the Vorony, I think they’re called. Means crow, eagle, something like that.’
‘Vorony?’ Anderson was thinking of what Dr Redman had said, and the notes he had made – the words ‘brawny’, ‘Trelawney’.
‘These guys do not mess about. Are you OK?’ Moffat was peering at him with some concern.
Just thankful that he hadn’t actually thrown up or passed out, Anderson managed, ‘Probably just a bit dehydrated, out in this sun …’
‘You have to keep your fluids up, mate. Another drink?’
‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’
Moffat looked at his watch. ‘Nine o’clock. I’d better go. Call me if you want to chat some more.’ And with that, he slapped Anderson on the back and was gone.
Anderson drained the last of his Coke, then waited a few minutes for his stomach to settle.
‘Hey, look what the cat drags in when you’re not there to kick its arse!’ Lambie shook the other man by the hand. ‘Dr Batten, as I live and breathe.’
Mick Batten’s eyes darted round the room. ‘Have you lot been credit-crunched or downsized or something? Well, they do say small is beautiful.’
‘Is this a social call?’ asked Mulholland, after the initial round of hellos.
‘No, I was called in by ACC Howlett,’ Batten said, putting Mulholland firmly in his place. ‘Where’s Colin?’
Something in his voice made Lambie turn round from the CCTV film he had been analysing. ‘That’s just what ACC Howlett asked, but he’s not back. Were you expecting him?’
‘He said he’d be here by now. Do we know where he is?’
‘He was heading out to meet DCI Moffat.’
‘Did he say where?’
‘It’s on the chart – we can’t even go for a pee without telling teacher. He’s up at the lochside. Why – you expecting trouble?’ asked Lambie.
‘Like I’m expecting the rain. It’s only a matter of time.’ He put his satchel on the table beside Lambie and pulled a seat in so close that Lambie retreated at the smell of tobacco. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Tracing the CCTV from the bottom of Bruce Court. That’s the flats where –’
‘Thomas Carruthers lived and died. You trying to track down who threw him out the window?’ Batten unwrapped some chewing gum, oblivious to Lambie subtly edging their seats apart. ‘You looking at the main door?’
‘I’ve just seen Mary going out at 10.04 a.m., so I think the killer will have been watching and will appear soon.’ He leaned forward, concentrating on the four images on the screen in front of him.
‘There are two doors?’
‘Two plus another two you need a key for. These doors are just an entry pad.’
They watched in silence as people came and went, carrying shopping, standing chatting, walking quickly, walking slowly. A small dog kept running up to the door, hoping to get in, only to be thwarted.
‘How much footage do you have to go?’
‘A lot!’
‘Well, you get on with it; I’m not going to interrupt. I’ll just get myself up to speed.’ Batten walked over to the board and stood, arms folded, with his back to them.
Lambie kept watching the CCTV footage. Every time the clock ticked over, he knew he must be closer to finding Mr Aspel. He had stopped the film a few times, noting down the time and a description of anybody who looked as if they might be of interest. Then the recognizable figure of Rene appeared, on the camera for the east door. She entered with a key, rather than using the keypad. For the next ten minutes nobody came or went. It didn’t make sense.
He sighed loudly. ‘He should be here somewhere.’
‘Start before Mary leaves and run the film backwards,’ suggested Batten. ‘He might have accurately judged your thinking and been inside all the time, waiting for Mary to leave the flat. They might have known each other, remember – easy to say, “Oh, come round Monday morning, Mary’s going out at whatever time.” There might have been trust there.’ Batten slid back into the seat beside Lambie. The time on the cloak was 8.55 a.m. A man appeared, coming out of the flat backwards, having held the door open for a woman reversing her shopping trolley out. He was walking quickly backwards, wearing dark glasses.
Batten tapped the screen. ‘Take it back three minutes, then play it forwards.’
Lambie did so. The figure appeared, his head turned away from the camera. And it stayed that way. He was tall, male, slim, blond or grey-haired. He timed his approach perfectly to help an elderly resident come through the door with her shopping trolley. He looked respectable, and he entered unchallenged. Once in, he paused a little, looking up.
‘He’s looking for the camera,’ remarked Batten. ‘Do you know who he is?’
‘Tall and grey-haired, tanned? Looks a bit like Michael Aspel? I think that’s Eric Moffat.’
‘I thought you said Anderson was out with Eric Moffat right now,’ said Batten to nobody as both Mulholland and Lambie were already on their phones.
Anderson sat in his car for a few minutes with the window open, trying to clear his mind a little. He really felt like going to sleep, but he had to get home. It was just after half past nine, the sun was setting, and the light would soon be fading. He pulled out on to the dual carriageway and headed back into Glasgow. He had only gone a few miles when he began to notice that his vision was blurring, that the white lines in the middle of the road were drifting. He was starting to feel sick, his head thick and woozy. He wondered if the sun had given him a migraine.
He pulled into a lay-by and parked, got out and walked to the trees at the side of the road, thinking he was going to be sick. He heard a car pull in behind him but didn’t turn round to look; he was trying to get his phone out of his pocket, and he had already dropped his car keys. He couldn’t even think about picking them up. He was just going to sit here with his back against a tree and try to calm the turbulence in his stomach.
‘Are you OK, mate?’ It was Moffat.
‘I think I’m having a stroke. God, I feel awful.’
‘I saw you pull up.’ Moffat hauled him to his feet. ‘Come on out the sun, Colin, away from the road.’
Anderson was trying to say that there was no sun, and why should they move away from the road, but nothing was coming out of his mouth. All he could hear was the cawing of the crows that circled overhead. He suddenly thought of MacFadyean, dead among the trees, alone with the crows.
Moffat was talking, his voice sounding muffled in Anderson’s ears. ‘You know you’d never have got this far without help from us. But you were coming to that conclusion, weren’t you? Slowly. Your problem, Colin, is that you’re too bright.’
He was being pushed deeper into the wood, and tried to pull away, but his limbs refused to obey him. Whichever way Moffat moved him, his body agreed. Moffat pressed him up against a tree, pulling his arms behind him, and he felt plastic clips being put on his wrists.
The restraints were drawn tight, then tighter still. Any tighter and his wrists would start to bleed, and he’d get blood on his shirt, clean on that morning. He had ironed it himself.
Another man appeared out of the forest from behind them. He said something, but in such a heavy accent that Anderson couldn’t understand. He tried to turn his head, to look Moffat right in the eyes. But Moffat’s returning stare was that of somebody who was doing a job and doing it right. He stood back and rolled one sleeve up, then the other, so as not to get them dirty. Then Anderson saw the three black tattoos on the upper part of Moffat’s arm.
Moffat clocked that he had seen them, and gave him a swift smirk. ‘Oh, yes,’ he taunted. ‘I’m going for the red.’
Anderson felt his head being pulled back by his hair. He could see flecks of grey on Moffat’s chin. By the time Moffat shaved that off, Anderson thought vaguely, he would be dead. In fact, by the time Moffat walked back to the lay-by he would be dead, and one of them would drive his car away. He had even left them his car keys, somewhere …
He saw the knife that seemed to appear from nowhere, a keen hunting blade with a curved edge like a bowie knife. He knew what was coming next. ‘Oh, Bren, Bren,’ he whispered silently, trying to picture his wife’s face. But all he could see was Helena McAlpine’s affectionately mocking smile. He tried to think of Peter and Claire, but could only remember them as babies. They were only wee, he thought, too young to go to Australia.
Then a moment of cruel clarity stabbed into his befogged brain, bringing images of splintered bones and blood. Oh God, Oh God, he prayed. Please …
He closed his eyes and waited. But he only heard a dull thud, and felt a very gentle punch in the stomach. He dropped his head, his brain telling him that he was feeling no pain. He knew he should be glad.
He opened his eyes. His stomach was bloodied, and grey matter was splattered across his shirt.
Moffat’s head had exploded.
Alone in the dark, Rosie had no idea how much time had passed or even what day it was. She was dry inside and soaking outside, and something had happened to Wullie. Or had Wullie come back and she had been asleep? Where had he been all this time? Maybe lying unconscious in a ditch somewhere, and then unconscious in hospital – where they would surely have seen his diabetic tag, and he would be brought round sooner or later. And now he had made his way home. She called out to him but there was no answer.
It was such a simple thing – before he went out she had asked him to pull the table that slid over the bed, holding the telephone and the laptop, to the side, over against the wall. Where she could not reach it. How could she have been that stupid? Before, she had always thought of it as being out of her way, not out of her reach. She knew she had finished the water in the jug, she knew she had eaten all her chocolate. She had fallen asleep with her throat dry and her lips flaking.
Until now she had been drowsy, almost unable to keep her eyes open, but now she was wide awake, staring at the full glass of water. A piece of cheesecake wrapped in a dirty paper napkin sat beside it on the bedside table. Wullie must have brought it back from the funeral for her. But why hadn’t he wakened her?
She heard a noise, a thunk-thunk. Two feet landing. She couldn’t turn on to her back to see without the handle that hung over her head, just out of reach. It wasn’t Wullie, was it? Wullie had gone.
She thought about calling again, then she smelled that smell – a brief scent in the air of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. They were there again, the memory of them was clear now. They had been before. They had not harmed her. They had just observed her and made their way to the front of the cottage.
It wasn’t Wullie, but somebody was looking after her. They had come last night. They were here again tonight.
She wished she knew who.
Anderson couldn’t lift his head; even if he wanted to, he couldn’t move a single muscle. He had seen the second man jerk once, then hit the ground. Now he waited numbly for the third bullet, and oblivion. But there was nothing.
Then he heard something – someone? – move in behind him, felt something pulling at his hands, and heard a snip. He closed his eyes, thinking that now was the time he was going to die. He breathed out, feeling strangely peaceful. His arms fell to his sides and a pain snapped across his chest as he heard himself breathing deeply in and out. Waiting.
But nothing.
There was silence. He opened his eyes; his vision was blurred but he thought he saw somebody. A shadow, moving quickly away through the trees? He couldn’t be sure of his own name at that moment. He took a step forward, stumbled and fell, thinking that he was alive, and alone. He had no idea how long he lay there, waiting for his head to clear, his limbs to wake up. He could hear the muffled roar of the traffic, and some crows calling overhead, and it seemed to grow cold. He picked himself up and walked forward very deliberately, taking care to pick his feet up over the long grass rather than trying to walk through it. He vomited up the beer and the Coke, and staggered against a tree, but he kept going down towards the road; it seemed a lot further, going back, than it had on the way up. He shuffled out on to the lay-by. His car was there, but he had locked it and he’d lost the keys. And somewhere, somehow, they had taken his phone.
He wiped the sweat and vomit from his face, rubbed the unthinkable from his shirt, and began to walk home.
He was still walking when the police car drew up behind him.