Wyngate was trying to get the girl from Central Records off the phone. At some point in the recent past, he must have mentioned to her that his son, Artie, was on to solids, and she had never forgotten it and resumed baby talk at every opportunity. The yellow light was flashing to say there was another caller on the line, and he looked out through the window into the hall, where a tall man stood, dressed smart-casual in jeans, a dark blue long-sleeved jumper and an anorak dripping over his shoulder. Wyngate took the opportunity to hang up and from the safety of the inner office, Anderson watched him welcome the visitor, David Griffin, the first officer on the scene.
The ex-police officer was now a counsellor with his own practice in Edinburgh, a kind-faced man, an expression that invited confidence. Kind hazel eyes, short grey-flecked hair, a trusting smile and a hint of a beard. He was the kind of man you would want to appear at your house after a terrible incident: capable without being overbearing, self-assured without being arrogant. He was confident in his own skin.
He shook Colin Anderson warmly by the hand and introduced himself, although everybody in the room knew exactly who he was. ‘DCI Anderson, we meet again.’
‘We have met before?’ asked Anderson. ‘Sorry, I don’t recall.’
‘No, you probably wouldn’t, we were both quite drunk at the time.’ He turned to smile at the rest of the room. ‘And it was a very long time ago. DI Costello I recognize. DS Mulholland, Vik is it?’ He nodded, then said to Wyngate. ‘I hope this lot treat you better than my team did when I was a DC.’
‘Doubt it,’ said Wyngate, ‘I’m the coffee boy.’
‘Mine’s white with two sugars, ta very much.’ Griffin clapped his hands together in delight. ‘Works every time.’
Wyngate pulled a face and sloped off to put the kettle on.
‘So, have a seat. I need to get up to speed on this one, David. We could do with an account of what happened that evening,’ said Anderson.
Griffin coughed slightly, a nervous swipe of his hand through his hair. He sat down, and took a deep breath. ‘Not something I like to revisit. It remains one of the most awful crime scenes I have ever come across.’
‘What made you go into the woods in the first place?’
He shook his head. ‘It was a noise. I don’t know what I heard, some kind of scream I presume, but I know at the time I did not think, oh my God somebody is being hurt. I walked up to the corner and heard something, saw something that wasn’t right. I think later it was the noise of the dog, maybe of one of the kids. I don’t know. But I know that I ran down that path. It was an early summer evening. Sue, I knew. I knew her husband from way back – we went to the same school. I was used to walking that beat, and I never expected any trouble. Not from the street, but the woods themselves were on our detail of places to patrol, teenage drinkers and the like, trying to have a bonfire and setting themselves alight. The odd junkie, nothing much.’
‘But on that night I must have known something was wrong, I ran until I was right on top of them. At the Doon, I found Sue. I thought she was sleeping, then I saw the red, and him standing, covered in her blood.’ He shook his head, the memory was painful. ‘I still thought she was sleeping. In that frock of white and red. I remember stopping a few feet away from him, I nearly ran into him. I was sick, then I screamed. At first I thought there had been a terrible accident. Then I saw Bobby.’ He swallowed hard. The room was silent. They had seen the photographs of what had happened to the wee boy.
Anderson wondered how much of that was his true memory, or how much of it had been altered with every retelling. It would be sanitized in Griffin’s mind by now. Many things would have been dropped from the story: the sheer brutality, the spilled blood, the clefts of flesh, the smell of it all, the blood and the shit and the piss – the fact that people in death are ugly and twisted; they do not lie nicely as if they are sleeping. They look as though they have fought, struggled and been terrified until the very last breath in their body has been squeezed out of them.
‘The evidence against Gyle stacks up.’
‘It does. There was some evidence he had been pestering her. He was older, she was pretty. His wife was ill and Steve was away a lot. Sue was very lovely, genuinely nobody had a bad word to say about her. She loved her kids, she loved her husband, sweet person. Steve was working that night, she had been in all day, so went out for a stroll with the boys at tea time. Gyle was out cutting wood. What happened next is anybody’s guess. But I finished it. I knocked him down then punched him.’ He shrugged, seemed to drift off. His eyes stared into the middle distance, his face drained white, his fingers went up to his lips. The room was silent apart from the hum of the computers. Anderson caught Wyngate’s eye, the young detective was near to tears. He had a son that age. ‘Sorry, I can’t stay here. I can’t look at those photographs.’ He wiped his face with the palms of his hands. ‘It’s exactly as they say, that the most terrifying images you have ever seen in your life are on the back of your eyelids. And they are there for an eternity. Sorry mate, no can do. I’m not up to this, not here.’ He glanced at the photograph of the scene at the Doon, and the bloodstained sunflower hat, then looked at his watch. ‘Say I’ll meet you in the pub later, Horseshoe Bar? Sorry.’ The door closed.
‘We should have taken them down before he came in,’ said Anderson.
‘Why? It’s going to be all over the news tomorrow.’
‘I am going for a sniff-about. There is something not right about this, but nobody wants to know. First thing, could Gyle hear Aird from the Doon? It’s a long way through dense trees. The initial investigation said no.’ Costello was on the phone to O’Hare, feet up on the desk, slowly turning the top of the Hobnob packet, twisting it round and round so nobody else could get in – well, not without making a noise. ‘So I was thinking about Gyle’s story. He took Aird from the Devil’s Pulpit to the house, going in the back door as Aird never ever used the front one. When he was asked what they did there, he said that he made Aird comfortable, there was a wee argument. Aird didn’t want to go to A and E, Gyle wanted to drive him there.’
‘I do have a job you know,’ said O’Hare with dry sarcasm.
Costello said, ‘Wheesht, in the original statement he uses the phrase, I made him a cup of tea or I put the kettle on for him – something like that when asked a direct question. But when we were talking to him in the Bar L, he said that he stayed for a cuppa. Then he said he was sick at the scene.’
‘Please don’t ask what—’
‘I was thinking if there was any of Gyle’s stomach contents in frozen storage that might prove that he had drunk some tea, thereby proving he had been at Aird’s house.’
‘Is that all? Would you like me to prove the existence of God in my lunchtime and solve Fermat’s Last Theorem before coffee break?’
‘Is that a no then?’
‘I’m afraid so. Costello, we are talking years ago and, well, it doesn’t really mean anything in the context of what happened that night.’
‘It lends weight to their story.’
‘And how did that go? He was called away by Aird, he leaves his axe, he comes back, he sees bodies everywhere, he gets down to see if he can help Sue, he gets covered in her blood, then he gets rugby-tackled by a young police officer who had heard the scuffle. They both got covered in blood as Griffin wrestled Gyle to the ground. And punched him. I remember the case at the time.’
‘But the dog bark. Gyle never said he heard the dog bark.’
‘Well that proves he is lying, doesn’t it?’
‘I think they both might be right and there was someone else there.’
‘Don’t be so brave, Costello. This was an open-and-shut case. Gyle was sent down, people do not want this dragged up again. What do you think you are doing?’
She snorted. ‘Not sure that I know. But Griffin said he vomited at the scene. Gyle said that he did too.’
‘There was only one sample of stomach contents collected, Griffin’s.’
She could hear him flick bits of paper over. ‘But not Gyle’s? Why not?’
‘Costello, it was over twenty years ago,’
‘But there would be a lab report. Do you not DNA-test ginger biscuits – you test every other bloody thing these days?’
O’Hare ignored her jibe. ‘Not in a witness, Costello. And nobody was saying Gyle was poisoned or had ingested magic mushrooms, so it would not have been analysed. It was Griffin’s vomit we collected. And that was only because it was there.’
‘Why not Gyle’s?’ she repeated.
‘He wasn’t sick, not according to this.’
‘He said he was.’
‘Maybe he said it made him sick, as in, it made him feel sick. But then, if you can’t stand the sight of blood, don’t go chopping people up. But to be clear, there were no samples of Gyle’s vomit collected at the scene.’
Costello could hear O’Hare’s fingers on a keyboard.
Then she had an idea. ‘What about the top of his boots? In case any vomit got caught there, as he spewed his guts up.’
‘Long shot.’
‘Come on, he’s been in the jail for over twenty years, you have the correct permissions. It would take Matilda ten minutes to check.’
‘It would take a lot longer than that, as you well know, and it would lend absolutely nothing to your timeline. And it would cost money.’
‘So?’
‘And it would lead to awkward questions, wouldn’t it? So sorry, no can do. Not without opening up a huge can of worms. It could, and would, sound like you knew that the prosecution had withheld evidence of not collecting a sample from the scene, or concealing the results of the analysis of that sample, and that could lend weight to Gyle’s argument of a miscarriage of justice. If that comes out there will be trouble – no smoke without fire on police cover-up. You only have one comment from Gyle that he ejected his stomach contents at the scene, and God knows he has had twenty years’ worth of dark and lonely nights to think that one up.’
‘So if you look and find nothing, then at least every stone has been turned. I think that’s what we have been told to do here. Or maybe I misheard?’ She tried to smile down the phone, but something in his tone told her it would be a step too far.
‘I have to answer to my bosses as well, Costello, so sorry: no can do this time.’
Colin Anderson and David Griffin were sitting at a corner table in the Horseshoe pub, an orange juice in front of both of them. Two forty-something women at the bar turned round to look at them appraisingly. They were impressed. Anderson looked away but Griffin lifted his glass to toast them.
‘God knows what they think of us, sitting here with bloody orange juice.’
‘Well, they will either think that we are light on our loafers, or that we are not drinking because we have our Maseratis outside.’ Griffin leaned back on the chair and smiled, taking it all in. He seemed very at home in a pub, very keen to be friendly to everybody. ‘Not that I have a Maserati; I have a Morris Minor and a Hillman Imp that I spend money on. And a boring Ford Focus I drive about in. So here’s to us, the last of the big drinkers, eh? Cheers.’ They clinked glasses. ‘Tinkering with old cars was how I got through it, you know. Being on my own, distracted doing something physical that was of no use to anybody. Just a tip for the future. Drink does not help.’
‘But getting out my house does,’ said Anderson. ‘I feel it’s like a pressure cooker in there.’
They sat in silence, following the overloud conversation of the redhead who was getting a new bathroom.
‘So what are you thinking?’ asked Griffin. ‘While it’s nice to be in touch, I can’t say I enjoy revisiting that day. Thursday the twenty-seventh, 1992.’
‘To tell you the truth, I need to get a bit of emotional background on it all. It looks awful written down in black and white.’
‘It was awful.’ Griffin nodded, holding on to a mouthful of orange juice before swallowing it. He lifted his glass to his mouth again then put it back down. ‘It’s been twenty-three years but it’s still the first thing I think about every morning. Or I wake up, the sun is shining, and I think, oh it’s going to be a lovely day, and then it flashes into my mind, for like, no reason at all. There’s … well, it’s difficult to understand.’
‘Maybe not so difficult. I think the Shadowman will taint everything I do in life from here on in.’
Griffin eyes widened. ‘God, well you do know then. You are one of the few people who do.’ He shook his head before downing half a pint of orange juice.
‘How well did you know them? Sue and Steven?’
‘Steve. He was always called Steve. But yeah, as the community officer I knew them as a couple. And I knew Steve from school vaguely. He was a couple of years above me. They were a lovely couple, two nice wee kids. They had moved into that house two years before and were really trying to make it through those tough years, you know when the kids are really small and you walk around exhausted all the time. The mortgage stretched them and Steve was working all the hours in the garage. I think money was a bit tight. But in my role as community officer I had been called out a few times when Sue accused Gyle of this and Gyle accused Sue of that. It’s all in the file. It escalated quickly over that long, hot summer. I was too young, too inexperienced to deal with horrific crime. That’s why I ran out of Altmore Wood that evening screaming and crying like a baby.’
Anderson was content to let Griffin talk, realizing it might be easier to creep subtly up on the terrible memories of that day twenty-three years before. ‘So you have kids?’
‘Me, no. Not after that. Well, it was a result of that. My marriage broke up and that was one of the reasons. I fell to pieces after it; I was a bloody mess. No use to man nor beast. Just really shook my faith in human nature. For that to happen somewhere I knew well.’
‘Oh, I never knew you were a local lad.’
‘Yes, I was a banky, Clydebank born and bred. Only been in the job for a couple of years when it happened. Never got back to my work afterwards, not really.’
‘Was there a lot of trouble in the woods?’
‘They wanted no Hardgate neds to get up to their mischief. The lower part of the wood was more accessible from the road in those days. So on a warm balmy evening like that, we’d walk up the path and make sure nobody was lighting a bonfire or getting way too drunk, look out for syringes – this was 1992 remember.’ Griffin’s bright blue eyes seemed to cloud over. ‘I keep wanting to say that I heard a scream, but it wasn’t a scream. It was a noise.’ He lifted his glass again, draining the little juice that was left. ‘A terrible, spine-chilling noise.’
‘Was that Sue, or one of the …’ Anderson found he couldn’t ask the question.
‘The dog, I think it was the dog. It sounded as though he was tearing its guts out.’ Griffin rubbed his arms, cupping his hands round them, comforting himself. As the cuff of his shirt lifted slightly, Anderson saw some old scars on his arm. Had Griffin been driven to self-harm? He felt a knot at his own stomach – twenty-three years later and Griffin was still suffering.
‘I think Sue and the boys were already dead by then,’ he said quietly, eyes welling up. Then he pulled some strength from somewhere. ‘I ran over to them; I ran over and launched myself at them. I knocked him flying and there was a fight that I don’t recall anything about.’
‘You punched him in the face.’
‘I might have done. I have no memory. I do remember seeing that Sue was lying with her head against the wall, like a doll. Her head was at an angle. There were these cuts to her skin, like streaks of blood with black and white insides, it was the worst thing I … I picked her head up. She was dead; it was obvious she was dead but my brain just—’
‘Wouldn’t accept it. I get that totally.’
‘Afterwards, in counselling, they said that my brain was protecting itself from what it was seeing, by not believing it. You can read the file for what happened after that. I really don’t want to go through all that again. Fancy another drink?’
‘I’ll get them.’ Anderson got up and walked towards the bar, his hands shaking. It could have been Claire, Helena, Peter, any of them. All vulnerable. Somebody bumped his arm gently, one of the women, too old for her thick power brows, smiled at him invitingly, hoping he was going to buy them a drink and invite them for a seat. He smiled back and walked up the bar a little way, to where there was a clear gap, hoping that his action would be seen as a gentleman not wanting to disturb them. In reality he wanted time for his nerves to steady. And what had Costello always told him to do? Mutter that the cops were about to raid for sex workers plying their trade so they had better leave. By the time the designer-bearded barman asked what he wanted, he had totally forgotten why he was there and who with.