‘You had something to say about our chat yesterday, something to add?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Griffin coughed slightly, picked up another onion bhaji and had a bite. ‘Do you know Harry Easdale has died?’
‘Yes, he died of cancer a few weeks after he retired. Well, I think it was medical retirement, I didn’t know him well.’
‘He was the SIO on the case.’
‘I thought it was Levern; it was Levern I spoke to.’
‘On paper it was Levern, on the field it was Easdale, and he had to close that case and close it fast.’
‘Understandable.’
‘The case was investigated properly but—’
‘There are a few buts. We have got that far, David. All leads were followed but it was cursory at best.’
‘Easdale allowed me on the team but I should not have been there. I should have gone back to my duties as a beat bobby in the community and never been allowed near a case where I was a material witness. Where I knew the locals well, all their little traits and issues.’
‘Like the McMutries?’ Anderson’s phone went. It was O’Hare; no doubt it was about the bones. He thought about accepting it. The peshwari naan arrived on the table, and for the first time in over a year he felt hungry. He rejected the call.
‘Oh, they were dreadful, a real problem family. But they were not involved; they were small-time. They were housebreakers and vandals, then they started dealing and messed about the wrong people.’
‘Yeah, well, I think McPherson had to go abroad, for the good of his kneecaps.’
‘Barbara’s man?’ guessed Griffin. ‘No surprise there.’
‘Sounds like you keep up with things?’
‘People don’t change.’ He sipped his Kingfisher. ‘I’m good at people. I have a good practice, do a fair bit of PTSD work, “stress at work” type of counselling. Everything from people going through horrific surgery to people who get sick at the thought of going to work. We do a lot of work for banks and multinationals. We are so busy we are thinking of opening an office here in Glasgow. I mean, workers now get a BlackBerry so they can be contacted twenty-four/seven, then I get paid to talk them through the stress of being contacted twenty-four/seven.’ He looked at Anderson, a concerned smile. ‘How are you feeling now? How is this case affecting you? I can see the signs. I spent some time googling you, I hope you don’t mind. But if you need a chat, outwith this environment, I can put you in touch with good people.’
Anderson sat back, relaxing. He didn’t mind being here with tasty pakora and no nightmares, away from his wife and his daughter and the madness that seemed to invade his every thought. ‘I’d like to get into the head of Andrew Gyle.’
‘No, DCI Anderson, I think that is the last thing you want to do.’ Griffin talked quietly, although there was nobody in earshot. ‘There is something that has always bothered me.’ He put his hand out, fingers splayed, as if stopping any runaway thoughts Anderson might have. ‘Now this was going round at the time. It was looked at, but maybe not as closely as it should have been. Altmore Road has always been a strange place. There were rumours about Jock Aird, the guy that owned it all at one point … enjoyed …’
‘Enjoyed?’
‘Enjoyed the power. The women. The McMutrie woman, when her man left her, he kind of stepped in and … Used her, like a slave for … well, living in the house, rent free.’
‘What kind of slave, a bit of housekeeping?’
‘A bit more than that.’ Griffin’s eyes were fixed and deadly serious, an unspoken message.
‘What?’ Anderson nearly burst out laughing.
‘I’m telling you what the rumour was at the time. Not with the wife, she was a drunken old slapper, but with the daughter; she was young at the time. But Easdale would not investigate. The path at the back of the cottages, I presume it is still there?’
‘It runs along beyond the back fences – yes, it is still there.’
‘And if it looks used, then why does it look used? There is no reason for anybody to use it. There’s a bloody great road and pavement in front of the house that serves the job better. It always puzzled Easdale, that did. Who was going where unseen?’
‘Foxes.’
‘Bloody tall foxes. Branches at head height were snapped in that way something doesn’t bother growing when it’s constantly being disrupted. If there are any young girls in that street, teenagers? You know – you should keep an eye out. I have no proof but I felt I needed to say something.’
Anderson recalled wee Jennifer Lawson saying something about feeling watched. Peeping Tom? Was he still at it, twenty years later? He let his mind tick over. ‘There was no support to Gyle’s alibi other than Aird. Lorna was five at the time, she no longer speaks to her father.’ He was about to say something, he heard Costello’s voice in the back of his mind; there was a connection that he had not made. He waited, picking at a bhaji. ‘Somebody paid five grand into Gyle’s account to help with bills, his landlord waived the rent. Aird?’ He put his bhaji down, his appetite gone. ‘Would you recognize her now, the Gyle girl?’
‘Lorna? Doubt it, twenty years on. I don’t have enough memory of her to see the adult that the five-year-old would grow into. I read her book when it came out but all the pictures in it had been redacted. I’m bloody sure she would not want anybody to know who her dad was and what he was capable of.’
Anderson, thinking about Aird, asked carefully, ‘So you do believe, beyond all reasonable doubt, that it was Gyle?’
‘Yes.’ He put his beer down. ‘Yes, I do. But as you say, Aird had power. Gyle had no life. Where did that five grand come from? The free rent? Aird was the landlord. Gyle had one thing of value. His daughter.’
Anderson slipped his jacket from his shoulders and tried to stop the nausea welling up. He couldn’t, so he made his excuses and walked swiftly, following the sign for the toilets.
O’Hare’s opening gambit had been You don’t have your problems to seek.
At first Costello thought he meant about the foot, about the case then realized he was talking about Anderson.
O’Hare explained he had already phoned the DCI and he had – O’Hare picked his words carefully – ‘been busy’. As O’Hare had pulled strings to get the bones processed as quickly as possible, he was more than a little pissed off.
Costello could hardly believe it – well, she could. Anderson was so disconnected to the case but had attached to Griffin like an old friend. So, with nothing else to do, she offered to drive round to the morgue. It was on her way home anyway. Sort of.
O’Hare had only got as far as pulling out the trays of bone fragments when his pager had gone, leaving her alone in one of the labs off the side of the mortuary. It was cold. An assistant was moving aluminium dishes around, clattering them about. The noise echoed and bounced off every hard surface.
She had said to him, ‘Could you possibly do that any louder?’
And he had obliged.
So she walked away, over to the arrangement of bones: light brown, dark brown, pitted and broken. These bones had been collected, roughly dated, and reported to be of no interest to the investigation as they had been washed down from the old graveyard on the top of the hill, beyond old Jock’s house. She thought back to what Wyngate had been researching – the geography, the sinkhole, the volume of water, the bones at the bottom. Jock Aird had known where all this was coming from. He might be older than Noah’s granddad, but he knew his stuff, he knew the land.
Somewhere up there was another body. Not one a hundred, two hundred years old, but one much more recent, and bits of it had ended up swirling around in the bottom of the sinkhole. They had to find the rest. And then the rain started again.
She looked at the little bones – ‘pebbles and chessmen’, somebody had said. She peered closely at them. O’Hare said they fitted together; their facets and age were all consistent to this set of pale cream bones. She wondered what other stories they had to tell. She walked round being nosey, looking at this and that. She saw a pile of paper, computerized bar codes. She recognized them as the markers that go over the evidence productions as they go through forensics. Everybody had their label, everybody was traceable. All evidence trackable. She flicked through; the number of the Melrose case was committed totally to her memory. And there it was. Swabs taken from a pair of size ten workman’s boots, from the superior/anterior toe area.
So the old goat had checked it after all. A wee word to Matilda to have a look, see if any organic matter was present. If it was present, then it would look bad if they had not tested it. But he had pressed her to look in the first place. The great thing about pathologists was that they didn’t care how unpopular they were.