28

There was always a point in an investigation where Karen felt the tangle of evidence start to unravel. She had the sense that they were teetering on the edge of organising the disjointed bits and pieces they’d amassed. Get it wrong now, and it might never work out. But get it right, and they’d have the answer to what had happened to Lara Hardie.

Thrilled by her discovery, Daisy needed to let off steam and decided to go for her official exercise while Karen cooked dinner. ‘I’m going to go up Calton Hill,’ she announced. ‘That’ll blow the cobwebs away.’

‘Enjoy yourself,’ Karen said absently. She found shallots and peppers, a slightly soft beetroot and half a bulb of fennel and began peeling and chopping. But her hands were on automatic pilot. What was going on behind her eyes was a very different process. She was sifting and sorting, adjusting and adapting, searching for the right route to resolution. She turned on the oven, chopped up the chorizo, unwrapped the chicken and patted it dry. She paused in mid-action as something struck her afresh.

Chorizo into the hot roasting tin, followed by a generous slug of chilli and garlic oil. Then the chicken, followed by the vegetables. Karen gave them a good rummle around then slammed them into the oven. Cooking was the best distraction, she reckoned. The only trouble was that sometimes she was so rapt that a crucial ingredient went on the missing list.

That evening, though, everything went to plan. Daisy returned just as Karen was giving the roasting tin a final shake. ‘Three minutes,’ she said, reaching for a bottle of full-on Australian Shiraz. Daisy’s eyebrows rose. Wine was usually reserved for the weekend, a mutual decision at the end of the first week of lockdown after they realised there were eight empty wine bottles in the recycling bin. ‘We deserve it,’ Karen said. ‘I’m worried about Jason and his mum and his fuckwit brother.’

They said little as they ate, but once they’d cleared their plates, Karen said, ‘I’m starting to see the way forward here. It’s almost exactly a year since Lara went missing. I think it’s time we talked to the family.’

Daisy seemed surprised. ‘Won’t that be giving them false hope? If we rock up after all this time, they’ll be expecting us to have something positive to tell them.’

‘That’s why the anniversary works in our favour. It’s not like we’re showing up out of the blue for no reason, which really would be a major indication of progress.’ There was no arguing with Karen when she adopted that tone of voice. ‘I’m going to call them and ask for a meeting.’

‘Face to face?’

‘They live in Perth. The place is full of parks and outdoor spaces. The weather forecast’s good for tomorrow – I checked. I’m going to call them now and see if I can set something up.’ She stood up and headed for the table laden with files. A quick search turned up the Hardie family details. Janet and Andrew, and their daughter Emma, still living at home.

Karen took a deep breath and keyed in the landline, aware of Daisy’s eyes on her. It rang half a dozen times, then a young woman’s voice said, ‘Hello?’

‘Is that Emma?’

‘Speaking. Who is this, please?’

‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie from Police—’

‘Have you found Lara?’ Excitement and trepidation in those few words.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t have any news to give you.’

‘Oh.’ Crestfallen.

‘But I was hoping I could meet you and your parents. To reassure you we’re still investigating her disappearance. I know it’s coming up for a year since Lara vanished and it might be helpful for me to talk to you all.’

‘Helpful how? We told you everything, again and again.’

Karen dug deep. ‘Sometimes things surface after a while. Would you be willing to meet?’

A long pause. ‘How can we meet? We’re in lockdown, remember?’ Frustration creeping in now.

‘Police officers are allowed to travel further than the five-mile limit when we’re working. I thought we could get together safely somewhere out of doors. The weather’s quite mild, and I know Perth has a lot of green space in the city. I could drive up tomorrow and meet you in the morning, somewhere that suits you.’

‘I don’t know. I’ll have to ask Mum and Dad if they want to.’

‘I understand. I’ll give you my number and maybe you could call me back?’

‘OK. But I’m not sure they’ll be up for it. My dad especially. But I’ll ask.’ She ended the call abruptly.

Daisy gave Karen the thumbs up. ‘That sounded pretty positive.’

‘I’m not holding my breath. The lassie was all over the place, and no wonder. Let’s see what happens next. Come on, it’s time for some crap telly.’

As instructed, at ten precisely the next morning, Karen walked up the path of the Hardies’ house. It was a solid Victorian semi-detached villa set back from the Glasgow Road. In normal times, there would be a steady flow of traffic on the busy arterial road, but this morning scarcely a car passed. She rang the bell, took a couple of steps back and waited. The door opened a crack and a young woman’s face appeared. The resemblance to Lara Hardie was striking. ‘I’m DCI Pirie,’ Karen said.

‘Yeah, I googled you. Your photo in the papers doesn’t flatter you, but I can see it’s you. Come round the side of the house to the back garden, we can sit out there.’

Karen wanted to say that grief was the most effective diet she’d ever known, but thought better of it. Emma Hardie was allowed to be rude; she wasn’t. There was a wooden gate in the wall leading to the garden, but it was unfastened. She emerged into a riotous flower bed surrounding a neat lawn. Crocuses, dwarf irises, varieties of narcissi and grape hyacinths. It was an unexpected riot of colour in April in Scotland. She had to drag her eyes away from the display to the two women standing by the entrance to a conservatory. Emma she knew; the other woman was an older edition of her two daughters. The same bone structure, the same dark blue eyes. The complexion was similar, except that a network of fine lines surrounded her eyes and her mouth.

‘What a beautiful garden,’ Karen exclaimed.

‘It keeps me busy,’ Janet Hardie said, her voice listless.

Emma waved towards a picnic table, the sort with an attached bench on either side, much beloved by pubs, not least because drunken rowdies couldn’t throw the chairs. Karen didn’t think that had been a consideration here.

‘I thought we could sit here. Mum and me on one side, and you at the opposite end on the other side,’ Emma said firmly.

The three women arranged themselves as Emma had suggested. ‘What about Mr Hardie?’ Karen asked.

Emma looked away, reaching for her mother’s hand. ‘Dad’s not joining us. He doesn’t have a very high opinion of the police anyway, and when we looked you up online and saw you were in charge of the Historic Cases Unit, he got really upset. You didn’t tell me you were a cold case detective when we spoke last night.’

‘None of us thinks Lara’s disappearance is a “cold case”, as you call it. It’s not even a year since she was taken.’ Janet Hardie fixed Karen with a disdainful look. ‘And you’re no nearer catching the person who took her.’

‘It would probably be more accurate to call my team the Unresolved Cases Unit. But the powers that be think that draws too much attention to our occasional lack of success. So they call us the Historic Cases Unit. It’s not because these cases don’t matter. They do. We take them very seriously. We’ve had some remarkable results and we bring the same commitment to every case that crosses our desks.’

‘Fine words. But what does that actually mean?’ Now there was anger seeping through Janet’s calm facade.

‘It means we go back to the beginning and reread every statement and check that every loose end was pursued. But one of the most important things we do is go back to the families and the partners of the missing person and listen to them talking about the one who isn’t there. Informal conversation sometimes brings new things to light.’

‘You said that on the phone,’ Emma said with a sigh. ‘Do you not think if there was anything relevant we’d have told you by now?’

‘I’m sure you would have. But we don’t always recognise what’s relevant. And that’s why I wanted to hear you talking about Lara as you remember her.’

‘She was a lovely girl,’ Janet said. Karen noted the past tense. This was a family who had managed to admit their daughter wasn’t coming home. It was unusual, in her experience, for families to be so pragmatic. ‘People talk about hormonal teenagers arguing and getting into trouble, but Lara was never like that. She never slammed a door, never called us names, never gave us a reason to worry.’

‘Not like me,’ Emma said. ‘I was the difficult one. “Why can’t you be more like Lara,” was what I always heard. Here and at school. But I didn’t resent her. You couldn’t resent Lara, she was too much fun. She could always make me laugh when I was getting on my high horse.’

‘She was a clever girl.’ Janet again.

‘She worked really hard.’ It was a gentle corrective. ‘I always got better grades, Mum, and I was totally lazy. She wasn’t stupid, don’t get me wrong. But Lara had to graft for everything.’

‘She was just more thorough than you. You’ve always been slapdash.’

Emma pursed her lips. It was clearly not the first time she’d felt diminished by the comparison with her sister.

‘Why did she choose English at university?’ Karen wanted to move away from the contention.

‘She loved reading. From being a little girl, she always had her nose in a book. She got that from her dad. Andrew’s always been a big reader and he got both the girls started young, first on comics and then books. He’d have loved to go to university and do English, but he had to go into the family firm.’

‘We make tourist tartan,’ Emma said. ‘Scarves, teddy bears, umbrellas. We supply the fabrics. It’s a dying trade. The Chinese and the Bangladeshis undercut us all the time nowadays. Thankfully that means I won’t be corralled into the family business like Dad was.’

‘So Lara was following your dad’s dreams?’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Janet said wearily. ‘She was her own person. She loved words and she wanted to be a writer herself.’

Karen hugged herself inwardly. She hadn’t had to drag the conversation round to what she wanted to talk about. ‘Was that something she’d always wanted?’

‘She was a great storyteller, right from being a wee lassie. Whenever we went anywhere in the car, Lara would see something interesting and make up a story about it. She kept us all entertained.’

Emma looked less entranced. ‘She was always reading me poems she’d written when we were teenagers. They were pretty lame, but her ambition was real. And she worked hard at it. She used to tell me the trick of being a writer was in the rewrites, and she reworked everything she wrote. She’d sit with a thesaurus, trying to find a better way of expressing what she thought.’

‘She was always writing short stories and sending them off to magazines. She even managed to get a couple published in The People’s Friend.’ Remembering this, Janet thawed.

Emma rolled her eyes. ‘That was before she started uni. She never mentioned The People’s Friend to her cool student pals. And who could blame her? It’s not exactly a ticket to a publishing contract.’

‘Did she ever consider doing a creative writing course?’ Karen steered the conversation away from Lara’s juvenile successes.

‘Edinburgh doesn’t do creative writing modules at undergrad level. But Dad was so keen for Lara to go to Edinburgh, she went there to please him. She always wanted to please,’ Emma said.

‘That’s not fair, Emma. Lara wanted to go to Edinburgh because it’s one of the best universities in the world. And you don’t need to do a degree in creative writing to become a successful writer.’

Emma shrugged. ‘She was talking about doing a Masters in creative writing at Edinburgh. She thought it was the best way to hone her skills.’

‘But a Masters? That was quite a way off, she still had more than a year of her degree to go. What was she doing in between? Apart from reading, obviously.’

Emma grinned. ‘She was fangirling.’

Janet gave a sharp sigh. ‘That’s not a very nice way of putting it. Lara thought listening to other writers talk about their work would help her develop good habits. And quite right too.’

‘She listened to a shedload of podcasts. And she went to readings, when she could afford it.’

‘You make it sound like we kept her short of cash,’ Janet complained. ‘If she’d ever asked for a sub to go to a book event, I’d have happily given her the money.’

‘She liked to think she was standing on her own two feet,’ Emma said. ‘I don’t have the same issue, do I, Mum?’ She gave her mother a gentle dig in the ribs.

Janet almost smiled. ‘No, you certainly don’t.’

‘I’m going to be a fashion designer,’ Emma said. ‘I’ve got an internship at the V&A in Dundee.’

‘Well done. Did Lara sign up for workshops as well as going to readings?’

Emma shrugged. ‘She didn’t have much cash for something expensive like that. But she did manage to scrape the money together a couple of times. She earned a few quid working in the kitchen at the Film House on Lothian Road and she spent the cash on doing a workshop a couple of months before . . . ’ Her voice tailed off.

‘Was that with Jake Stein? I saw something about that in the file.’

‘No, that was the second one she went to. She signed up for his workshop on the recommendation of the guy who was running the first one. He told her she needed to work on pace and suspense and that Jake Stein was the master at that. It didn’t hurt that she was already a big fan. She’s got all his books.’

‘Do you remember who gave Lara the recommendation?’ Karen tried to keep her tone light.

Emma frowned. ‘What was his name?’ She looked up into the heavens for inspiration. ‘Mum, do you remember?’

Janet shook her head. ‘I know he won the Golden Thistle. All his books begin with Re-something . . . ’

Karen felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising. ‘Restitution. Revenge. Retribution.’

‘That’s the one,’ Janet said. ‘Him. Rendition. That was his last one.’

Not De-something, like the fictitious Rob Thomas. But Re-something, like the chess-playing Ross McEwen.