3

For once, Karen had slept well. She’d made porridge with some dried fruit and a carton of coconut water, in the absence of milk. The ingredients came courtesy of Hamish, who disdained traditional methods of making porridge in favour of store cupboard extravaganzas. It was usually grounds for mockery on Karen’s part but that morning she was grateful.

The wind had dropped and the sun was shining, turning the Firth of Forth from gunmetal grey to picture postcard blue. She understood that lockdown was perilous for many people’s mental health, but for her, it felt almost like a blessing. The usual pressure from on high for results was absent; the only detective work being conducted was on live cases, and even then, the constraints of social distancing were mostly being observed. These days, her perpetual nemesis ACC Ann Markie had more important things on her mind than making Karen’s life more difficult.

Not that she was skiving. She might have grown up in a household with little regard for the Church of Scotland, but nevertheless the Protestant work ethic was ingrained in her. Not having Markie chittering in her ear like a monkey on her back had given Karen the opportunity to take a more leisurely, granular approach to some of the intractable cold cases in her files. It felt like a luxury to be able to re-examine old cases with the closest possible attention.

She’d barely started on a comparison between two stabbings, one in Dundee and the other in Kilmarnock, when the familiar tomtom alert of a FaceTime call interrupted her search for common factors. ‘Hamish,’ she muttered, arranging her face into a welcoming look before she accepted the call. He loomed into sight, grinning, golden hair tumbled round his face in an unfamiliar style.

‘Morning, Karen. I finished taking the feed round the sheep and I thought I’d give you a quick call before I head down to the still. What are you up to?’

‘Digging into a couple of knife attacks from three years ago,’ she said.

‘You can’t leave it alone, can you?’ Affectionate, not critical.

‘Keeps me out of trouble when you’re not here to do that. What have you done to your hair?’

He gave a little shrug, pushing the curls back from his forehead. ‘You like it? I’ve been doing a lot more work with the livestock since Donny buggered off at the start of lockdown and I was fed up with it getting in the way, so Teegan got the scissors out. And I thought, while you’re at it, why not lighten it a bit?’

Karen felt a tug of something she didn’t want to examine. ‘A woman of many talents, Teegan,’ she said. For fuck’s sake, surely she wasn’t feeling insecure over a twenty-something teuchter who’d never been further south than Inverness? ‘She’s done a good job, you look about six months younger.’

‘I don’t think she’ll be giving Eilidh anything to worry about any time soon,’ he chuckled. ‘But it does what I needed.’

‘The colour suits you. Though it does make your beard look more gingery. So how’s life on the farm? Any cases of the COVID up your way yet?’

He shook his head. ‘Not that I’ve heard. People are being careful, though. Shona Macleod is turning out Harris Tweed face masks with the offcuts from the tailoring business, so we’re all sweating like beasts whenever we go into the village shop.’ He peered into the screen. ‘Hey, you’re in your place.’

‘Yeah, I walked down during the night.’

‘Is that even legal?’

‘We’re allowed to check on unoccupied properties as long as we don’t come into contact with anyone outside our bubble. And there’s nobody here to come into contact with, so I reckon I’m technically within the rules.’

‘So you left Daisy in the flat alone?’ He seemed faintly cross though she couldn’t imagine why that might be.

‘She’s not a teenager, Hamish. She’s not going to trash the place.’

‘Come on, Karen, I never suggested she would. I guess it’s that I don’t know her too well.’

Sometimes, when he was annoyed, his American teenage self slipped the leash of his cultivated Scottish present, she thought. ‘So, what? You’re worried she’s going to read your secret diaries? Examine your bank statements?’

‘No, but—’

‘Why would you imagine she’d be interested in you anyway? If anybody’s got anything to fear from her prying eyes, it’s me. And I trust the lassie.’ Karen grinned at him.

He held his hands up, palms facing her, in a gesture of concession. ‘I’m sorry, I was out of order.’ He tutted. ‘I hate FaceTime. There’s no nuance. I’m never sure when you’re taking the piss.’

‘Just assume I usually am,’ she said, trying for a tease. She hated it when things became scratchy between them; this separation had seemed to make that happen more often. He began to speak, but she was distracted by her phone. ‘Sorry, it’s work, I have to take this,’ she said, guiltily glad of the intrusion. ‘Talk soon, handsome.’ She blew him a kiss and cut the connection.

‘Jason, what’s up?’ Karen said, switching straight into professional mode.

‘Hi, boss. Sorry to bother you, but I’ve just had a funny phone call.’

‘What kind of funny?’

‘This is going to sound really weird.’

Karen smothered a sigh. One day the Mint might learn how to get to the point. ‘Let me be the judge of that. What’s happened?’

‘Meera Reddy phoned—’

‘Your National Library contact?’

‘Aye.’

‘Have they not been sent home?’

‘Yeah, but this goes back to something before lockdown. She’s been transferred to archives. You remember Lara Hardie?’

‘Of course. You’d have to have been living under a stone when she disappeared not to know about her. I reviewed the papers when they passed it over to us before Christmas. What’s Lara Hardie got to do with the National Library archives?’

‘Meera found something. She thinks it’s like a blueprint or a kind of explanation for what happened to Lara Hardie.’

Karen straightened up. ‘What? Jason, go right back to the beginning and tell me exactly what Meera said.’ She listened patiently while he stumbled through an outline of what Meera had told him. It begged more questions than it answered, inevitably. Jason was getting better at interviewing witnesses, there was no doubting that. But the one thing Karen couldn’t teach him was an instinct for the key questions.

‘You say this manuscript of Meera’s mentions the victim suffering from epilepsy?’ she asked.

‘Not just any old epilepsy, boss. Drop attacks. It’s a thing. I googled it. It’s like all your muscles kind of drop out for a few seconds. You just collapse like somebody cut the strings. It’s over almost before anybody knows it’s happening, apparently. Mostly you totally recover in seconds and it’s only dangerous if you hurt yourself falling, or bang into something on the way down. Its proper name is Atonic Seizure. It’s what Lara Hardie suffered from. Remember how the internet true crime detectives fixed on it, convinced she’d collapsed outside her front door and been huckled into some passing maniac’s car?’

As if she could forget the hysteria of the mob. ‘I remember. And there were the fuckwits who wanted to drag the Union Canal. As if Lara Hardie could’ve walked more than a mile down to the canal basin without being spotted by a living soul or a CCTV camera, then just happened to have a seizure while nobody was looking.’

‘Aye, right. Well, the lassie in this book, the lassie that disappears, she suffers from the drop attacks too. It’s not like it’s that common.’ He drew breath, then said, ‘So what do you think, boss? Is Meera imagining things or what?’

‘Meera’s a smart lassie, right?’

Jason gave a strangled laugh. ‘She’s a helluva lot smarter than me. I know that’s not saying much—’

‘Stop fishing. Do we know who her boss is?’

‘Bethan Carmichael,’ he said, sounding pleased with himself. ‘I got her phone number. I’ll ping it to you.’

‘OK, Jason. Nice work. What I need you to do now is to write up your conversation with Meera. Every cough and spit.’

‘Are we going to dig into it now?’ He couldn’t hide the excitement in his voice. After the bungled investigation that had led to him breaking his leg, ACC Markie had wanted to move him to a desk job. That would surely have doused the enthusiasm that was one of the reasons Karen had fought so hard to keep him on her team.

‘Leave it with me,’ she said. ‘I need to figure out how we deal with this without breaking lockdown rules.’

He laughed. ‘That would be something, eh? Senior polis breaking the lockdown law.’

On that wry note, Karen ended the conversation. She experienced a low buzz of adrenaline that she hadn’t felt since they’d been sent home three weeks before, when she’d instructed Jason and Daisy to pack up all the physical files for unsolved murders and suspicious disappearances and move them to Hamish’s flat. For the first time, it seemed possible that they had a genuine new lead to follow.

Karen pulled her laptop towards her and started typing up a skeleton of what Jason had told her. Now wasn’t the time for detail; now was the time to form a plan of action.

It didn’t take her long to outline the next steps on this particular journey. She’d been working cold cases for long enough to know the basic shape of an inquiry that delved into histories that some people wanted to stay buried. Exhumation was a skill she’d developed long ago.

She needed to get her hands on a copy of the manuscript in question, which would mean sweet-talking Meera’s boss. Then she’d have to read the manuscript and refresh herself with the case papers to see whether the plot of the novel mapped on to the reality to any significant degree. Then maybe – and it was a big maybe – they might start to unravel what had happened to Lara Hardie.

Ideally, she’d like Daisy to go through the rest of Jake Stein’s archive to see whether anything else might connect with Lara Hardie. Further down the line, Jason, who provoked the maternal instinct in so many women, could talk again to Lara’s mother, her sister and her friends in the light of what they might uncover now. But access would be the big stumbling block, she feared.

Time to pick someone else’s brains. DCI Jimmy Hutton had been on her ‘favourites’ list since her late partner Phil Parhatka had been his bagman. After Phil had died, Jimmy and Karen had become a support group of two, meeting regularly to work through their loss and to sample the myriad gins that had appeared out of nowhere to flood the market. The impossibility of meeting over a glass or two was already something she missed keenly. Not because of the alcohol but because of the conversation.

Now, he answered his phone on the second ring. ‘Listen, Karen,’ he began without preamble. ‘Do you think it would work if we met up on the Zoom for a drink and a blether?’

‘It’d be a bit weird. Let’s see how long this goes on for. See how desperate we get,’ she chuckled.

‘Right enough. So I’m guessing this isn’t a social call? What can I do for you?’

‘I’ve read all the memos and the briefings from on high about how we go about things in this weird new state of affairs. But I’ll be honest, with me not being a front-line officer, it kind of went in one ear and out the other. So I don’t really have a sense of how the policing is working on the ground. What happens when you need to talk to witnesses? Or get access to evidence?’

‘Are you tidying up loose ends? Or have you managed to find a new case to work?’ He sounded incredulous.

‘Might have.’ She tried to sound nonchalant. ‘We were looking at old cases, but there’s an outside chance we’ve got a fresh lead on a misper that’s barely cold. Might be something and nothing but I need to check it out. And nobody seems to know how long this lockdown’s going to last.’

‘I should have known. Doing a jigsaw and watching box sets isn’t your kind of thing. Well, we’ve been told that the beat goes on. There’s no free pass for the villains or the toe­rags. We still go out and arrest folk, in their homes if we have to. But we’ve got to wear masks and use hand sanitisers and keep our distance. We’re taking patrol cars with us to bring them in because they’ve got the Perspex screens between the front seats and the back. If we can get them into an interview room, we have to keep two metres distance.’

Karen snorted. ‘That sounds totally impractical.’

‘It’s a nightmare, is what it is. You know what the neds are like – “I’ve got the COVID, I’m going to cough my germs on you, ya cunt.” So we’re doing our best. With witness statements, if they’ve got a computer or a smartphone, we’re trying to do them on screen. Otherwise, it’s kind of take your life in your hands.’ He sighed. ‘We’re all going to get it.’

‘It’s scary,’ she acknowledged. ‘Nobody knows what’s coming at us down the line. Is this going to be the one that sees us off? Like the asteroid and the dinosaurs? Or is it just going to be a jacked-up version of the flu?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. All we can do is drink gin and try to do our jobs. Have you got plenty masks and hand sanitisers?’

She groaned. ‘Even the gin might be under threat, Jimmy. You’re not going to believe Hamish’s latest. He’s taken over a wee still in the village and he’s making heather hand sanitiser instead of gin.’ Jimmy said nothing. ‘And since he’s had to close the coffee shops here in Edinburgh, he’s talking about using his baristas to do home deliveries of the stuff.’

‘He never misses a chance.’ Jimmy’s voice was flat. She knew he was comparing Hamish to Phil. The dead man would come out on top; the dead always did. ‘So what’s this new lead you’re chasing?’

‘I’ll tell you if it comes to anything. It might be the deranged fantasy of a lockdown mind,’ she said wryly.

‘Plenty of that about. I don’t even know why we’re bothering, to be honest. The backlog in the courts was already horrendous. This is just going to make things way worse. They’re already talking about more than two years between the offence and the court appearance.’

‘That’s a helluva long time for victims and their families to wait for justice. And I can just see the defence advocates rubbing their hands in glee.’ She assumed a posh accent. ‘ “So, Mrs McPhee, do you really expect the court to believe you can recall the events of a drunken night three years ago with such accuracy?” There’s going to be a lot of free passes down the line.’

Jimmy sighed. ‘No kidding. But we just have to press on. Let me know if there’s anything I can help with.’

‘Will do.’ She ended the call, already running through her options. For the first time since COVID had curtailed their lives, Karen felt invigorated. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to be so committed to her job. That was a damn sight better than having nothing more than the next Scandi crime drama to fire her up in lockdown.