46

‘How many lies does it take to turn circumstantial evidence into truth?’ Karen asked, contemplating a salted milk chocolate praline.

Daisy chewed her chocolate treacle toffee, swallowed it and said, ‘How many have we got?’

Karen bit into the praline and made an appreciative noise. ‘Rosalind Harris said she vaguely remembered meeting McEwen at a few crime writing functions, when he’d been coming round her house for two years playing chess with her husband. She denied knowing whether Stein had a regular chess partner. Me, I think I’d notice if the same guy kept turning up at my house once a fortnight, even if we didn’t have much to do with each other.’

‘Plus she omitted to mention that she was in a relationship with this guy that she only vaguely remembered. I’ve never managed to pull that off,’ Daisy said. ‘Though heaven knows I’ve tried.’ She grinned. ‘The reason for keeping things secret was a bit shoogly too. I’ve only ever kept somebody I was sleeping with a secret when there was what you might call an overlap. And there’s been nothing like that since Rosalind divorced Stein, and certainly not since he died.’

‘Let’s not forget I saw Ross McEwen coming out of her apartment block at Quartermile with her. Snogging on the doorstep.’

‘Total breach of COVID rules,’ Daisy said solemnly. ‘Social media would lose its tiny collective mind over that. Plus McEwen never came forward at the time Lara disappeared to say he knew her and he’d definitely seen her the night before she went missing. That’s a big sin of omission.’ She reached for a dark chocolate strawberry cream.

‘OK, so that’s the relationship lies. I want to talk about this,’ Karen said, pulling the photocopied MS in front of her. ‘I’ve seen the original now. And I’ve seen some of Stein’s other first drafts. You mentioned this right at the start, and I’m sorry I didn’t pay attention at the time. Not in my wheelhouse, as the cliché goes. You said The Vanishing of Laurel Oliver was amazingly clean. But his other first drafts – they don’t look like this. There are small corrections – words swapped for similar ones, that sort of thing. And there are much bigger changes. Whole paragraphs deleted, sentences turned about. One where a minor character’s name was changed. Wee notes to himself to check things. So this manuscript doesn’t match the others. I’m not a literary critic, but that seems significant. What do you think? Am I talking shite?’ Apparently without thinking or consulting the guide, Karen went straight for a nut cluster.

‘No, you’re on the money, I’d say. If there’s no earlier version of this MS, it’d be really surprising if he got it so right straight off the bat. Where did you get these, by the way? They’re lush.’

‘They were in a gift bag at the back of the wardrobe. If they weren’t for me, they should have been.’ A tart note in her voice that made Daisy’s eyebrows rise.

‘Finders keepers, boss . . . Something struck me as well, going through it again the other day. I didn’t have Jake Stein marked down as a man with much self-awareness. Now, maybe this was a double bluff but I don’t think he would have been able to picture himself as the loser in the way he’s portrayed here. I think we should think about getting a textual analysis of the manuscript, compared to Stein’s published works and to McEwen’s.’

‘That’s not going to be cheap.’

‘There’s bound to be some geek at the university who knows how to do it. Plus there’s software for it now,’ Daisy said. ‘With the availability of text on the internet, student work is routinely checked for plagiarism. I’m sure you can run comparisons in the same way.’

‘What? To see if they copy each other?’

‘It’s more to do with the way they compose sentences. Grammatical formations. Favourite words. The algorithms work it out. Do you not remember a few years ago there was that big stooshie about that political thriller that came out under a pseudonym? And people were making all kinds of wild guesses about who it might be? Everybody from George Osborne to Janey Godley. And it turned out to be some Glaswegian down-table hack on the Telegraph that nobody had heard of? And they got him on language. We could do the same, get him that way?’

Karen wrote EVIDENCE on her pad and underlined it. She added textual analysis underneath.

‘And there’s that pencil note you found on the back of the Part 2 page. There might be something there. Handwriting comparison maybe?’

Karen bit into a liquid centre and screwed up her face in revulsion. ‘I thought that was rum baba, but it’s horrible.’ She studied the list. ‘Pisco sour,’ she revealed in disgust. ‘Who would do a thing like that?’ She pulled a face and grabbed a chocolate mint cracknel to take the taste away. ‘Handwriting analysis isn’t a science, it’s an art. All depends on the level of experience. But it’s worth bearing in mind. The bottom line is, if we can prove McEwen wrote The Vanishing of Laurel Oliver, it all becomes much more straightforward.’

‘And if Jason finds security camera footage of Ross McEwen’s car going in and out of Olga’s caravan site, at the very least he’s got questions to answer.’

‘If the gods are smiling.’

‘So what’s our next step?’ Daisy’s hand crept towards the chocolate ginger, but Karen got there first.

‘Two things. In the morning, you see what you can find out about the timeline on the short story. And we wait for Jason. If he finds what we need, and your timeline works, we bring them both in. Interview under caution. If they won’t come, we arrest them. She’s the weak point. He won’t budge, I’d put money on it. But she might be persuaded that she can have a life after this if she can lay it all on him.’

‘If she knows about it?’

‘If she knows about it. I’m inclined to think she knows enough.’

‘First thing in the morning?’

Karen shook her head. ‘I’d rather do it in the evening. Provided you and Jason get the goods. That way, we keep them hanging about into the small hours, let them stew. If their lawyers kick off, we’ll bed them down in the cells.’

‘You have a very dark streak.’ Daisy put the lid on the chocolates with a look of regret.

‘Someone should probably have told Hamish I come with a government health warning.’

‘He’s a big boy, he can take his chances along with the rest of us.’

‘Aye, and if you find him floating face down in the Water of Leith, don’t come looking for me. I’ll be the one with the alibi with a cast of thousands.’