At the top of Mulholland’s action list was a name, Mrs Jackie Mulroony, and a note that she might be worth a chat, plus an address. She was listed as the next of kin of a missing person, Maureen Laverty, a cousin who had walked out of the house and disappeared. Mulholland obviously thought it was a good fit. Anderson indicated and pulled the BMW up outside the neat bungalow in Rutherglen, a clean dark-red Corsa on the recently powerwashed monoblocked driveway, a fat yellow Labrador lying on the step, enjoying the early-afternoon sun. Anderson wasn’t one for making tenuous connections himself, but he trusted Mulholland’s instinct as a detective and a researcher. He couldn’t bring himself to think of that healthy young man lying now in his hospital bed. They were talking of putting him in an induced coma. Anderson shuddered: that was a step too close to drifting into the endless night.
But his DS had been on to something, and as too much in this case had already been taken at face value, Anderson had clearly stated to his sergeant that he wanted no prior knowledge of what he had gleaned from his internet and background checks. So here he was, ignorant of the connection his DS had made.
There was a dog and a small dark car, whatever that was worth.
Anderson saw the pale-blue curtain in the front room being pulled to the side and let go. Mrs Mulroony was waiting for him. From the brief notes he had, she had not seen her cousin Maureen for forty-two years. He didn’t see the point of keeping her waiting any longer.
Minutes later, he was seated in a padded carver chair round the dining table. A pile of photographs waited for his attention; the top one showed three teenagers piled up on a patterned blue velvet sofa, the wallpaper behind it equally hideously patterned in the geometric combinations of the 1970s. Also on the table was a family photograph album, a large pot of tea and a plate of Marks and Spencer’s chocolate biscuits.
Mrs Jacqueline Mulroony, who asked to be called Jackie, was a youthful-looking sixty-plus redhead, dressed in a Lycra tracksuit and stocking feet. She explained, apologizing for her dress, that she had just been out with the dog, the Labrador called Chester, who was now locked in the kitchen, noisily sniffing under the door for a biscuit.
Jackie sat down opposite him, her fingers curled round a Dunoon china mug with a stag on it. She smiled at him nervously, as if she was about to be interviewed for a position she had no chance of getting. Anderson tried to stop his eyes floating to the montage of family pictures in the large photo frame on the wall behind her head. He thought he could track two of the three teenagers through the years, to their weddings, the christening of their own kids and, in one case, a Christmas with a grandchild, but the life of the dark-haired teenager with the bunches, wearing the red dungarees, stopped on the blue velvet sofa.
‘I know you have spoken to DS Mulholland.’
Jackie nodded, her eyes narrowing in slight suspicion. ‘Do you think you have found Maureen?’
‘It’s a theory we’re working through, and there’re things about your cousin that fit.’ He took a sip of his tea, aware that Jackie was now looking more confused than anything.
‘So what’s this all about, then?’
‘I won’t lie to you. Maureen was your cousin and …’
‘Past tense? Is she dead?’
‘She hasn’t been seen for over forty-two years. She was twenty-one or so …’
‘When I last saw her, yes. My mother and her mother were sisters, and Aunt Chrissie, her mum, saw her after that … but Chrissie’s been dead for ten years or more, and my mother died not long after, so the story of Maureen, Mo, had kind of stopped.’
‘She didn’t go to her mum’s funeral?’
‘Or her dad’s.’ Jackie shrugged, took another sip.
‘So the story of Maureen? What is it?’
‘I don’t know if any of it was true.’ Another shrug.
‘It doesn’t matter. Anything you can tell us can be checked and verified, but at the moment we only have a missing person’s report to go by. That was by a flatmate who said Maureen hadn’t come home when expected, but the flatmate was away for a week, so we have no idea when Maureen actually did go missing. In the report, the flatmate said that Maureen had a boyfriend who could be a bit nasty. She was last seen in June 1978 in a café in the West End of Glasgow.’
‘As far as the family knew, she got herself into trouble when she was seventeen or so.’
‘Is that a euphemism?’ Anderson asked. ‘Given your age at the time and the fact it was the seventies?’
‘To be really honest, I don’t know, but I can’t imagine anything else would splinter the family like that. My Uncle Drew was a bit old-fashioned.’ She reached out and opened the photo album. A clean fingernail flicked through, then pointed to an overweight man in a good suit, standing with his arms round a slightly younger and darker version of Jackie, the picture obviously taken at a happy family occasion. ‘That’s him and Auntie Chrissie – their wedding anniversary, I think. They thought the world of Maureen – Mo. My mum got a bit fed up hearing how bloody wonderful she was. She was an only child. And then she was hanging around with an unsuitable man, then she was gone. In trouble …’
‘My mum always used to say “expecting” in a very quiet voice.’
‘She had her bottom button undone; seemingly, that was a sign of being pregnant.’ Jackie laughed, and the tension broke.
‘I’ve never heard of that one.’
‘I didn’t know if she was pregnant. Mum never said, but Mo was never around after that, not in our house. As I said, Auntie Chrissie saw her a few times. I remember Mum talking about it, but there was a sense that she was trouble and, well, Mum didn’t want my brother or me to be affected by it, in case we were led astray.’
Anderson nodded. ‘Yes, I can understand that. Is that Mo? In the dungarees?’
‘The mighty Mo – yes, that’s her. Must have been fourteen or fifteen then.’
Anderson looked at the photograph, slightly faded, and the same colours separating with age as on the pictures of the scene where Birdie lost her life, or, much more likely, where Mo had lost her life. She looked so young, so alive in the photo. It was just as well she had no idea what lay ahead. His mind suddenly flashed back to Mulholland. He needed to concentrate. ‘Did she look like that later? The hair colour, her build? When you last saw her, can you remember? She’s very slim there, dark hair – was it always long? Was she still slim the last time you saw her? Her eyes in this are a lovely shade of brown.’ He turned the photograph around and slid it across the table to her.
Jackie considered that for a moment, studying the picture. ‘That’s me in the middle, my brother on the bottom; God, we must have been suffocating him. We all had brown eyes. Mo’s were a lighter brown, but we wanted lilac eyes like Liz Taylor, so no luck there.’
Anderson let the silence lie.
‘I think I remember Mum saying something like “the state of Mo now”. Auntie Chrissie had said she was dressing like a bag lady, so skinny, and she had lovely dark hair and cut most of it off. Mum said if I ever did that, she’d kill me.’
And DCI Colin Anderson muttered inwardly, ‘Oh, shit.’
‘You’ve found her, haven’t you?’
‘She’s never kept the best of health, mentally or physically, so behave. It took a lot of persuasion to let us visit.’ Anderson warned Costello who appeared to be in a weirdly buoyant mood. He had already given Veronica Riley his mobile number, and after they knocked on the door, his phone rang. He answered it, then turned to the key box at the side of the door and spun each of the dials until it opened. He lifted out the key, slid it into the lock, opening the door a few inches before he returned the key. All the time he was responding to the instructions coming down the phone with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘Yes, I’ve done that’. Costello noted that above the key box were four bore holes from a recently removed name plate.
Her ex-husband had said that Veronica didn’t keep so well these days and that she found life a struggle, adding that the stress of her childhood had always cast a shadow over her adult life, sometimes pushing her over the edge of paranoia.
Costello knew that James Riley had attended A and E once for injuries that may have been the result of spousal abuse. There were no charges pressed and there was a note that his wife’s medication had been ‘stepped down’ at the time, an action that her mental health specialist considered ill-advised.
James had left her two years later and remarried – in fact, his present wife had been doing some shopping for Veronica during lockdown. On the phone, he had talked of her with empathy rather than hatred, while describing Frankie Scanlon as a monumental pain in the bum. Then he confessed that he had never met him, as the daughter and father were ‘not close’.
Not close. Far away from being daddy’s little girl.
As the door opened fully, Anderson shouted hello, switched his phone off and slid it into his pocket, then pulled out and used his hand gel, following the quiet voice that called, ‘I’m in here.’
The living room had been converted into a bedroom, the curtains still closed. A bed with an air ripple mattress. They knew Veronica was fifty years old, but she could have been Loretta’s mother. She had the face of Birdie, but the cheekbones that created the beauty in one were just shelves for hammocks of sagging skin in the other. Her right shoulder sat awkwardly on the pillow, the fist pulled under the blanket, a couple of tubes running to a white machine at the side of the bed. There was a commode to the side, and the smell suggested it needed emptying. Two walking sticks hung over the side barrier of the bed.
Veronica saw them looking and apologized. ‘I’m due the nurse; I thought that might be her when I heard your footsteps.’ Veronica Riley held out the skeleton of her left hand, and the skin at the back showed bruising and a nasty puncture wound as if a cannula had been removed. Anderson reluctantly took the bony fingers as Costello just nodded and introduced herself from the corner of the room, leaving Anderson the obvious visitor’s chair. The whole room looked as if it belonged to somebody in their eighties and frail. Not like Eddie Dukes. Maybe Veronica’s face was catching up with her surroundings.
‘No doubt you are here about Eddie. I hope you don’t want me to say that I’m sorry. He should never have got out. I know it was judged that he had served his time and paid his debt to society and all that crap, but she was my mother.’
‘I’m sure you heard your dad say on many occasion that the sentence rarely fits the crime. I can’t imagine how awful it was to lose your mum like that.’
‘Why are you here?’ Her face flushed with colour, and she reached round for the mask of her nebulizer.
Once she settled, Anderson took a deep breath. ‘We are pursuing a strange line of enquiry. That maybe your mother was not killed by Eddie Dukes in 1978.’
‘Yes, she was. I know, I was there.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I can still see it when I close my eyes.’
‘What can you see?’ he asked gently.
‘Eddie standing, the knife in his hand. There had been shouting from the kitchen while I was outside in the garden. My parents never argued, my mum never raised her voice, so I ran into the kitchen.’ She sighed. ‘He was standing over her, with the knife. I think he was crying.’
‘You witnessed something awful when you were very young. Does anything strike you as odd, now, looking back? You have had forty years to look at the situation.’
‘I’ve been told not to. I have to put that memory in a box. The past is the past.’
‘Veronica, can I ask you a very strange question? Have you ever had any reason to believe that your mother had survived that attack somehow? Christmas presents? Odd things happening on your birthday?’
‘No. She’s not alive.’ The retort was that of a child, simple without emotion. It wasn’t true. End of.
‘Veronica?’
‘No. Do you not think that’s what I dreamed of, that she’d come back for me? She never did.’ Veronica considered this for a moment, closing her eyes dramatically, tilting her head to one side, suddenly looking every inch like her mother’s daughter. ‘No, somebody has you fooled,’ she said again, as if after observing the crime scene in her mind’s eye, she found nothing to challenge the evidence behind the facts as she knew them. ‘I saw her body. I saw the blood. I think I went up to her. Eddie stopped me. Ben was behind me, screaming the place down.’ She looked deeply into nowhere. ‘I saw with my own eyes what Eddie Dukes did. I don’t remember opening the door. I may have manufactured a memory of me standing there, still hanging on to the door and trying to figure out what was going on in our kitchen, as if I was frozen in time. My memory is that I stood absolutely still, with my mouth open, seeing what I was seeing but not believing it. In reality, I’m sure I barged in, shouting hello to my mum the same way I always did. I had no idea what was behind that door. Under the pulley, my mum was lying in the floor. I thought she had fallen. There was a man: Uncle Eddie. He was standing over her, trying to help her up. He was pulling at her arm, making her head jerk about. He had a knife.
‘I can really only see, in the eye of my memory, her face covered by her dark hair. It stuck to her features like a mask. I don’t know if that’s real or not. So much of it could be a construct of my childish brain. I’ve been through so much bloody therapy that I’m not sure what’s real or not. That look of horror and guilt on Uncle Eddie’s face when he saw me. And the smell. I do remember the smell.’
‘Can you tell us what happened to Ben, your brother?’
The sudden change of tack caught her off guard: the look of alarm, just a little confusion. A quick flick through the memory banks, as if looking for a lie that has been told and retold so often that it had started to grow into truth.
‘I’m sure you know. We were out for a walk and he fell. I think I’ve told myself that it all went wrong when Ben died, but it really all changed when Ben was born – lovely, bubbly little Benjamin Scanlon. I was so excited when I went into the back bedroom to see him when he was born. I was six and had been told, vaguely, that I was about to have a wee brother or a wee sister. He was born at home. I’d to go to the neighbour’s, Mrs Standing from across the road. She did all her own baking, so the scones were good. Then my dad arrived, Mrs Standing gave him a hug and they whispered something. Mr Standing appeared and shook my dad’s hand, slipped a cigar into his top pocket.
‘I was watching this from my seat in the kitchen, looking through the gap in the door to the front hall, watching. They chatted for a while; they forgot I was there. I lost something at that moment. I don’t think they handled it well. I mean, I loved my wee brother and he was my shadow. I couldn’t go anywhere without him following me. As soon as he could walk, he was always there, right behind me. Then Mum wasn’t Mum anymore. Dad was never there. The skies got darker, the summer shorter. A long, long winter fell on our little house. Mum faded away at that time, as if the nourishment she had in her body could cope with me, but the additional strain of Ben drained her. It tipped her over the edge. Dad was out working all day, most of the night – making the world a better place, he said. Mum died, we lost Ben, and Dad was so scared of losing me that he never took his eyes off me … Which is interesting, because after Mum died, I never quite looked at him in the same way.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘He stayed friends with Eddie. I mean, how could he do that? I don’t recall much about it – I don’t think you notice the subtleties of life when you’re that young – but I do recall people coming and going when Ben died. It was a usual walk, up the hill. The dog was running around; I was keeping an eye on Boggle, the beagle – I liked him. Ben wasn’t going fast enough. He was moaning and pulling on my arm. It was sore. I felt Ben’s hand slip from mine, then he was gone. He had slipped off the path. I saw his face. He looked up at me, surprised that his little boots were no longer on terra firma. He couldn’t get a grip on the slippery ferns and down he went, ever so slowly. His arms reached out to me, grabbing at the fresh air, and then he slipped away. Both his arms up over his head, kicking at the sky, his green anorak, toggles flying through the air. I found it funny. He was rolling down the hill, covered in ferns. I saw his face. That is a picture that haunts me. Somewhere, as he fell, he hit his head. Can you pass me that cup of water?’ She reached out with her hand to take it, left-handed like her mother.
‘Do you still speak to your dad?’
‘Nope.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘He left me at the home. It was awful there. If he had loved me at all, he would have come and taken me away, but he was too busy.’
‘Busy?’
‘Busy. I suspect it was his old secretary. Mum suspected something going on there, I think. He went abroad.’ She sipped her water, the thought of that abandonment taking time to settle.
‘Was it bad at the home?’
‘It’s taken me most of my life to get over what happened in there. I know now the trouble I could get them into, a lot of trouble, but at the time I was terrified. I’d lie in my bed, the blanket over my eyes, trying not to breathe while the matron did her rounds. I’d hear doors open and close. I stayed still. There was a lot of what I now know was abuse. But I am over that now. It was so bad. I had a plan to escape, to get away from the men.’ Veronica’s eyes lit up, then she closed them. ‘I never did get away.’
‘Dawn?’
Veronica gave a little snort. ‘I often wonder what would have happened if we had made it.’
‘Nothing.’
‘I know that now, but I still like to dream of that life I might have had. We had it all planned. We sneaked downstairs, keeping to the side where the wooden steps didn’t make a noise. At one point, the warden came round the corner, and I had to blend into the wooden panelling. He went right past me. Then I ran for it. I picked up my plastic bag and ran for it, jumping over the gravel, getting on to the grass and skirting round to the trees away from the bright lights of the house. From there, I just waited for one of the catering staff to go through the gates. We slipped out while the gates were open, right alongside his car, just as he was looking the other way to get out on to the road. It was dark. There was a park at the far side of the road and that was where I was headed that night.’ She paused, making sure they were both caught up with the story.
Anderson avoided looking at Costello, knowing that this story was at odds with Lynda Armstrong’s version.
‘They came quickly. This time they had dogs with them – just the four of them. I ran for the rough ground. They didn’t see me. I was quick and it was dark. I rolled and hid, lying low on a crack in the earth. As soon as they let the dogs go, they found me within minutes. They walked me back – these men who held all kinds of power over me, they weren’t ready to relinquish it any time soon.
‘Back at the house, I was checked over and locked back up, not in my own room where my books and posters were, but in another room where there were chains on the side of the bed. They’d come and inject me, the men, and then I would fall asleep, a deep black sleep. And every time they did that, I’d dream the same dreams of running and being free. I’d dream of my dad, of us being together, in spite of the waking nightmare that he had brought me to that place and left me here. I’d dream that the men came – they’d put their sweaty hands all over me, their eyes inches from mine. I could feel their breath on my face, and sometimes I thought I could hear their words, but they were muttering; they had long and quiet discussions at the other side of the room.
‘That was on a good night. On a bad night, it would be so much worse and I could be left bleeding and bruised. I could feel the control they had over me, but I could never accept it. Then when I got back to my room, I’d lie and look through the upper part of the window to the blue sky outside. In those days, the sky was always blue and I knew that one day, my blue-sky day, I would get out and I would never come back. Then I did get out and I never went back.’
The story went on for over an hour, Anderson becoming more distressed than Veronica by the end of it. The nurse did not appear, so Costello made Veronica a cup of tea and a sandwich, while Anderson continued with a gentler interview, trying to get her to open up about her life from the time she left the school to the time she married Riley. But all her answers showed that she saw that woman as a different person. Veronica Scanlon, the girl in the film, seemed to have disappeared the day she left St John’s.
Anderson drove the BMW round the corner and pulled into a petrol station, parking at the side and cutting the engine.
‘You OK?’ asked Costello.
‘You could listen to that and remain untouched by it? How can you do that?’
Costello shrugged. ‘It matters that we catch those responsible. We can’t do anything for her. That’s in the past. And I’m not sure that I believe all of it.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘In fact, I’m sure I believe very little of it. I’m sure she believes it. But time has passed. You looked at her like a dad looking at a kid. Not sure that’s the best way to investigate a crime like this.’
‘You are a hard-nosed bitch at times.’
‘You notice that her right hand never came out from under the duvet. Her table was at the right side. She’s right-handed. She never took that right hand out, even to eat the sandwich. She’s a fake.’
‘She’s mentally ill.’
‘She had the smarts not to show us her right hand. Just think what that means for a moment.’