‘They’ve knocked St John’s into flats, you know.’
‘Have they?’ answered Anderson, not really listening, his mind still turning over the suicide of Anthony Poole.
‘Half a million, they are going for. Anyway, got hold of Elsie Graham, the former under-matron of St John’s or some fancy job title like that. She couldn’t tell me much.’
‘Good job that you didn’t drive all the way up there, then.’
‘She’s a bit old-school, if you pardon the pun. Refers to it as a school for disturbed children. She said that Veronica Scanlon was obviously struggling with what she saw when her mother was murdered. Then what happened to her wee brother – all the usual stuff you would expect. Their residents came from all over, but were mostly those that had families who still cared what happened to them and wanted to put their hands in their pockets to provide better social care for the kids.’
‘That sounds laudable.’
‘But the interesting bit …’
‘I’m glad there is an interesting bit,’ said Anderson.
‘… is when I asked her what she thought Veronica Scanlon might be up to? Want to guess what her answer was?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘She said, “Why, what’s she done now?”’
‘Thank you for coming all this way, Miss Fettercairn.’
The journalist’s eyes flickered from DCI Anderson to the small hard-faced blonde beside him. Then back again. There was a sign of a slight tension – not in the journalist’s face but in the way her back stiffened a little and her hands flattened on to the top of the table, the way she folded her arms tighter than was absolutely necessary. Her lips, similarly, were jammed close.
‘I’m sure you recall that I am Colin Anderson, DCI here at Partickhill covering both Major Case and Murder Squads.’ He paused to let that sink in. Without looking up, he opened the beige file that lay on the table in front of him, thick with dog-eared papers that had been well read and thumbed. ‘And my colleague here is DI Costello, also of the MIT and Major Case Squad. We work very closely together on many cases, which I am sure you know, as you are a respectable journalist and very thorough.’ He let that drift round the room for a moment. ‘And I’m sure you know about our very high clear-up rate.’
Clarissa Fettercairn nodded. ‘Oh, congratulations on doing the job that you are paid to do. You can sit there all you like and bring out as many files as you want. I’m not going to reveal the source of my information.’
Costello made a point of jotting that down in her notepad, exaggerating her hand movement as if joined-up writing was something new to her. Anderson turned his head slightly to watch. Once her hand stopped moving, she laid her biro down on the table and Anderson turned back to Fettercairn. And smiled.
The journalist sat back, looking from one to the other, obviously realizing that something was up.
‘So, Ms Fettercairn. Just to put you in the picture. We’re well aware of the identity of the source of your so-called intelligence and I’d like to point out that you haven’t put in print anything that’s not already in the public domain.’
‘It’s in the public interest.’
‘Shite,’ said Anderson politely.
The journalist opened her mouth, but Anderson cut in.
‘What you did do was put a lot of information in print about the Procurator Fiscal that was purely personal and is of no use to, or interest to, the public at large.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion.’
‘A matter of opinion that will be discussed between the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, the newspaper and your editor. And then maybe back to us, the police.’ Anderson looked at Costello. ‘What about you, Costello? Do you fancy her chances?’
‘Well, let me think about that for a moment.’ Costello looked at the ceiling for a millisecond. ‘Nope.’
Fettercairn opened her mouth and smiled, pointing a slowly uncurling finger in Costello’s direction until a beautifully beige Shellac fingernail was pointing directly at her face. ‘Oh, you are that Costello.’
‘I am a Costello, but whether I am that one remains to be seen.’
‘So, who is Daniel Fishbourne, Miss Fettercairn?’ snapped Anderson. ‘And before you ask, we do mean that Daniel Fishbourne.’
She froze immediately, her head tilted to the side slightly as she considered denying it.
Anderson leaned back in his chair. ‘You see, we are also very good at our jobs. We see here a conflict of interest or a lack of disclosure at best. As you know, we are looking into a case of historic child abuse, something that you yourself have expressed great interest in. So you will have no problem, I am sure’ – he paused – ‘telling us anything that you know about Daniel Fishbourne. Date of birth, 1927. Place of birth, Gourock. He moved to Invernock later, about five years later to be precise.’
‘Does the name ring any bells? We have come across him in another parallel investigation,’ added Costello.
‘Frankie Scanlon threw him down the stairs,’ she snapped.
‘Which is not good, we agree about that, but you obviously do know him – otherwise, you wouldn’t know that, would you?’
‘I don’t know him as such. He died many years ago.’
‘He was named in a child abuse enquiry.’
‘He was innocent.’
‘He was pointed out and identified by the victim.’
‘She was mistaken.’
‘She pointed out and identified him twice.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘She was six years old at the time.’
‘She was mistaken.’
‘She identified him twice. What are the chances of two paedophiles being active on the same beach within a couple of weeks?’
‘Veronica …’
‘So you know it was Veronica?’
‘She was mistaken.’
‘Was she? It couldn’t have been Gordon Ellis Whyte; he was given an alibi that he was in Cellardyke on the east coast that weekend, which is why the accusation stuck to Fishbourne. Those false alibis were given to Whyte by his wife. Whyte was a truck driver – the same thing happened with the Yorkshire Ripper, I believe. It wasn’t a police cover-up. It was good police work and simple geography. They had no idea who Whyte would grow into. The police are not seers. They did not “miss” anything.’
‘He was hounded out of town. He couldn’t stay here.’
‘Here?’ asked Anderson.
‘He couldn’t stay in Gourock,’ Fettercairn said quietly. ‘Invernock. It was because the victim was the daughter of a cop and they brought everything they could against …’
‘Your grandpa? Your uncle? Did he commit suicide in the end? It’s an unusual name, and we have a report of a suicide in that name,’ said Anderson gently.
‘Such an unusual name. You must have lived most of your life with that, I reckon. Must have been hard,’ added Costello sympathetically.
‘My granddad committed suicide because of what that wee girl said.’
‘No, she was mistaken. Your grandfather committed suicide because the gossip-mongers jumped the gun, people who gossip and spread news without checking the facts. Rumours were all over the place in those days, just as they are now all over social media, talking shite. Who is Mary Travers?’
‘What does she have to do—’
‘We know exactly who she is. Can you put her back on her lead and muzzle her? She may be well intentioned but she’s way off beam. We will take criminal proceedings against her if we feel—’
‘That’s not our job, Colin, that’s the fiscal’s job,’ offered Costello casually.
‘Oh, you are right there. Can’t imagine they’d have an issue with the way she’s been bad-mouthing them, telling you what shit to print. She’s the short blonde paralegal who thought this was going to get her somewhere, and well it might, but on the wrong side of the law. Mary Travers is a bit keen, a bit too keen to ruin people’s reputations because she doesn’t think the job is being done properly or quickly enough. That’s either naïve, misunderstanding process or thick. Anybody who repeats or has repeated what she says as fact could be in trouble.’
‘That’s unfair.’
‘Unfair? I can introduce you to a woman whose son has just hanged himself because of the muck that’s raked up on social media. That is disgusting and dangerous, and, frankly, it’s beneath you.’
‘DCI Anderson?’ asked Costello in mock politeness. ‘These people spreading gossip without checking facts – you are not referring to journalists, are you?’
‘No, Costello, I am not,’ he answered with a similar attitude. ‘I would have thought that, of all people, a journalist would be the one who would stand up for truth, maybe even justice, if that is not too much of a stretch for the Twitter-fed, laptop, latte-with-caramel-sauce generation. Somebody with sense could look at the bigger picture, as there is a very good book here, but you won’t write it because the facts don’t fit what is going on in your head.’
Costello nudged her boss. ‘Wouldn’t bother her. She doesn’t check her facts – that’s the whole bloody problem.’
‘True,’ agreed Anderson. ‘Like I say, we know where all this is coming from, but we do like to catch every link in the chain so we know where the real blame lies.’ He turned to face Fettercairn. ‘If you want to talk now, you can.’
‘Is this because of her?’ Fettercairn flicked her manicured thumb at Costello.
‘Is it?’ asked Anderson.
‘What have I got to do with it?’ asked Costello with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Me? You are talking as if I was the’ – she paused, recalling the quote – ‘“brief fling with an unnamed senior detective who was rumoured to have a close relationship with the fiscal, at the time when his wife was very ill”?’
Fettercairn coloured.
‘I mean, anybody would think we were investigating a murder in a care home or something.’
‘And what were you doing?’ asked Anderson.
‘Investigating a murder in a care home.’ Costello stood up and pushed her chair back, then lifted the file and pulled out a black-and-white photograph, a chiaroscuro of flesh, skin and muscle; only a recognizable eye referenced it as human. ‘There you go, Clarissa. That’s the victim of the psycho we caught. He took out a scalpel and removed her face. He sat her in front of a mirror so she could see, and feel, every single cut. You think about that for a minute, then you might want to look in the mirror yourself. Or you might want to write her story – that’s a tale worth telling. Her name was Sandra.’
‘You could donate all profits to those disfigured by crime,’ suggested Anderson.
Fettercairn closed her eyes.
‘She’s owed a wee bit more respect than you closing your eyes.’ Then Costello walked out of the room with the parting shot, ‘Oh and, by the way, she didn’t die. She’s still alive, with no face.’
Anderson pointed at Costello. ‘She did that out of badness. Needless to say, you picked the wrong one.’ He got to his feet and walked to the door, opening it for Fettercairn. ‘Off you go. We are busy.’
The journalist stood up, gathering up her handbag, her scarf and her dignity. ‘You have not heard the end of this.’
‘Oh, I guarantee it. Mind how you go, now.’
‘Has anybody heard how Vik is doing? I called last night, but nobody was up for telling me anything.’ Wyngate slipped his jacket from his shoulders. He looked over at Anderson who was sitting at his own desk, rubbing his nose where Brenda’s Poundland reading glasses had been annoying him. ‘Do you think he is going to be OK?’ The DC regarded his boss with a pleading look in his eyes, the way he used to when he was a rookie on the job and got everything wrong.
‘He’s been moved to critical care or whatever they call it now. Septicaemia is a very dangerous thing, so it’s touch and go, but as they said at the hospital, he is relatively young and healthy, so he should pull through. He has none of that co-morbidity stuff that O’Hare likes to talk about.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Wyngate.
‘When somebody has more than one thing wrong at a time,’ muttered Costello, not looking up from the file she was scrolling through. ‘Like stealing Hobnobs and voting Tory. You’ll get away with one, but not both.’
‘I have apologized unreservedly for exerting my taste in nibbles,’ said Wyngate, pulling a packet of chocolate Hobnobs from his jacket pocket. ‘And don’t accuse me of voting Tory.’
‘Stop it, you two. Elvie sends her regards and will let us know when it’s safe to go and visit Vik. In the meantime, all we can do is pray or whatever makes you feel comfortable in a situation that you can do nothing about. So’ – he stood up – ‘are we ready to move on a situation that we can do something about?’
‘I’m ready,’ said Costello.
‘Yes,’ said Anderson, ‘so you are.’ He looked her up and down, in her blue uniform. ‘That’s not a good colour for you.’