The following day Hanlon saw the killing on the newsfeed on her phone: Man Dies in Gorgie Park, but the story meant nothing to her. It was there with other news items such as Queensferry Road Smash, Two Held after Leith Incident, Woman Racially Abused on Bus and Hearts Manager Reveals New Plan to Beat Hibs.
She’d been to the gym and had gone for a five-mile run with the dog, who was now resting at the foot of her bed in her room at the hotel. It was Sunday and the roads were quiet. She reviewed what she knew so far.
Aurora had gone missing on Monday 24 January after returning visibly upset from a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She was a troubled girl with a history of drugs and rehab behind her; Dr John Griffiths, her lecturer, claimed that Aurora had possibly been abused by her father; her father, Hamish Cameron, appeared to enjoy relationships with young girls; Hanlon herself had been attacked in the car park of her hotel and warned off looking into Aurora’s disappearance; Aurora’s flatmate, Morag, had claimed that she suspected Griffiths of being involved in Aurora’s disappearance, she had also made other allegations about people close to Aurora, including her father; Morag had been murdered and some of her accusations seemed to be true but some were of doubtful veracity.
But whatever had or hadn’t happened, Hanlon was growing increasingly concerned as to Aurora’s safety.
Her phone went.
‘Hello, is that Hanlon, the detective?’
It was a girl’s voice, young with a faint Newcastle accent. ‘Yes, how can I help?’
‘It’s about the missing girl, Aurora Cameron… I think you ought to know that she was having an affair with her professor…’
‘Dr Griffiths?’
‘Yes, she wanted to break it off, but she was frightened… Griffiths looks nice, but he’s violent towards women…’
‘I see,’ Hanlon said, frowning. ‘Look, could I meet you to discuss this?’
‘No, it’s too dangerous.’ The girl sounded panicked. ‘This is off the record. I don’t want to be involved. It’s just a warning, and you should be careful too – he knows people.’
The call ended. Hanlon looked at Recents; caller ID had been blocked.
She sighed and added another question mark to the name of Dr Griffiths. Well, maybe his colleague could throw some light on the issue.
A couple of hours later she was in the café that had been nominated by Paul Wyre for their meeting. He was late. While she was waiting, she texted Murdo Campbell.
Could you get some background as to what Paul Wyre, writer in residence Edinburgh Uni, was in prison for?
She knew it was armed robbery but that could cover various scenarios; she wanted detail.
The café was a hipster place – Bean and Gone, it was called. It was full of mismatched furniture and exposed brickwork. It was busy; middle-class customers eating eggs Benedict, smashed avocado and reading Sunday newspapers. It was more or less her idea of hell. At the back of her mind she could imagine Dr Morgan shaking her head at her intolerance. There’s nothing wrong with drinking different kinds of coffee, and if you want oat milk is that such a terrible thing? She pushed these thoughts away. Now wasn’t the time for self-analysis. She forced herself to concentrate on her surroundings. The waiter had an elaborate beard with a curly waxed moustache. Still, the coffee was good so Hanlon forgave him.
Half an hour later than they’d agreed, Paul Wyre arrived. He was tall and thin, his shaven head glinting in the sun that shone through the café’s front window, heavy silver earrings shining. He had chunky silver rings on each finger and was wearing his long black leather trench-coat. The eighties revival starts here, thought Hanlon.
‘Hello!’ She waved cheerily at him as he came in. She instinctively knew it would antagonise him. I must stop doing this, she thought to herself. But it was hard not to want to prick the bubble of pomposity that surrounded the writer – ‘Look, I am an Artist!’ his dress proclaimed. Hanlon thought it also proclaimed, ‘Look, I’m an arsehole’ but for now she would keep that to herself.
‘Good morning,’ he said as he came over and sat opposite her. He smelt of weed, Lynx and self-satisfaction.
‘You wanted to see me?’ He sat back in a wicker chair in a theatrical way, flinging his arms onto the rests on the chair and tilting his head at a dramatic angle. She could see the waiter talking to the barista behind the counter; she glanced over at Wyre and rolled her eyes. She suspected they shared her opinion of him. The waiter came over and he ordered a tall, skinny latte.
‘They know me here,’ Wyre said confidingly to Hanlon. Oh, I bet they do, she thought.
She nodded. ‘I’m looking for Aurora Cameron.’
Paul Wyre said, ‘I heard she’d disappeared.’ He had a northern English accent – she must have read that he was from the North, but for some reason it hadn’t stuck. ‘Well, I certainly knew her, mainly through her friend and flatmate, the late, unlamented Morag.’
‘You didn’t get on with Morag?’ Hanlon wanted to hear his version of things.
Wyre laughed bitterly. ‘That’s the understatement of the year. She’s been a thorn in my side for a while. Nothing but trouble. I am not that surprised she’s dead.’
‘Really?’ Hanlon said. ‘Why’s that?’
Wyre’s eyes were quite glazed; Hanlon realised he was stoned. ‘She was always banging on about her bloody book, all the powerful people she was going to blow the whistle on. Sometimes I’d wonder if I was in it.’ He laughed. ‘But that’s probably just my ego talking… I guess one of them might have done it.’
Like you? thought Hanlon.
‘Did she ever show you the book?’ she asked.
Wyre shook his head then abruptly changed the subject. ‘She tried to seduce me, you know…’
‘Tried?’ queried Hanlon. She had guessed he would bring sex into the conversation; he was that kind of guy. Here we are, straight into it. The subtext, I’m irresistible to women.
‘OK,’ said Wyre, with an annoying mix of boasting and complaint, ‘I admit it, she seduced me.’
‘She was half your age,’ pointed out Hanlon.
‘Exactly,’ said Wyre, irritably. ‘That’s why it was so bloody easy for her.’ He shook his head in exasperation at Hanlon being so slow on the uptake. ‘I thought, stupidly, it was because she admired my work, found me sexy, whatever, then I discovered she wanted me to boost her grades so that she could get a first – she was doing an Eng Lit degree at the time.’
‘And you had no control over the marking?’
‘Exactly…’ He looked at her suspiciously. ‘You seem very well informed.’
Hanlon shrugged. ‘I hear stuff.’
‘Well, hear this.’ The coffee came and he made a kind of prayerful, namaste gesture to the bearded waiter to signal his thanks.
‘That looks amazing, Dominic.’
‘Enjoy,’ said the waiter with a sour look, as if he hoped Wyre would do anything but.
Wyre resumed his story. ‘I got a very nasty shock at the beginning of the year when I saw her name down on my Creative Writing MA. It was like she was stalking me. She said if I objected she’d cause trouble, and I believed her.’
‘So it wasn’t you abusing your position of power…’
‘Quite the reverse,’ agreed Wyre, not hearing, or choosing not to hear, the sarcasm in Hanlon’s voice. ‘And, meantime, my fiancée had found out about the fact I’d been sleeping with Morag, so she dumped me, and I lost my home.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My fiancée owned the flat.’ He scowled. ‘It was a lovely flat, and she booted me out. Now I’m renting a room in a shared flat in a scrotty basement in Marchmont, like a student.’
‘Well, you’re the one who had the affair,’ said Hanlon. ‘You can hardly blame her.’
‘OK, maybe that’s so.’ His tone of voice suggested it was far from reasonable. ‘I think it’s a childish overreaction personally. I’m an artist… I have needs…’ he shook his head in annoyance at his ex’s selfish refusal to accommodate his literary dalliances ‘… but I’ve got a pretty good idea that Morag told her. She was a vindictive cow, one of these people who increases her self-esteem by putting other people down… Anyway, enough about her, you wanted to talk to me about Aurora.’
‘Yes, did you know her well?’
‘Not really, mainly through Morag. I saw quite a bit of her when I was having my fling—’ he checked himself ‘—when Morag was having her fling with me. We used her flat a lot and I saw quite a bit of Aurora. She was doing a lot of drugs at the time, and I mean a lot.’ He emphasised the words ‘a lot’. ‘She was a sorry state. I know about these things… You’ve read my books?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
Wyre looked wounded.
‘They’re on my to-read list, alongside Shakespeare,’ she said.
Wyre shook his head pityingly.
‘Anyway, back to Aurora,’ he said. ‘Her grades were suffering – well, how could they not? I told Griffiths. He started helping her.’
‘Helping her?’ Griffiths hadn’t told her this. Modesty on his part?
‘Yes, he got her into the student counselling programme and I think he badgered her into going to NA and CA, that’s the same but specifically for cocaine.’ He smiled. ‘Just the traditional stuff for Aurora, she left spice and ket well alone.’
‘And it worked?’ asked Hanon.
Wyre nodded. ‘Yeah, it worked. That was a year ago. She quit coke, concentrated on her studies, started helping other people with coke problems. It was a remarkable transformation. I’ll give her that.’
‘And, of course, you would know about transformations.’
He nodded. ‘Yeah, you probably know my history. I was in prison for armed robbery, pretty hard-core stuff. I was involved with a lot of violence – it wasn’t nice. I was regarded as one of the hard men of Wakefield.’ That was said as a kind of boast: look at my prison credentials.
‘Why do you think she’s disappeared?’ asked Hanlon.
Wyre looked thoughtful.
‘If you’d asked me that last year, I’d have guessed to evade her coke debts. She was spending about three hundred a day, nose hard down to the mirror, a couple of grand a week. That’s serious money.’
‘Did her dad clear her debts?’ wondered Hanlon.
‘I don’t know,’ Wyre said. ‘I’m not sure he was necessarily aware of how big they’d got. I’m surprised that her dealer allowed it to escalate to that extent. Anyway, the last that I heard her dad was practising tough love and refusing to bail her out any more. He paid her credit card, he could work out what was what on that, but he’d given up advancing her any cash to stop it disappearing up her nose.’ He finished his coffee. ‘And that is all I really know about Aurora. I’ve been out of touch with her since Morag and I stopped seeing each other.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Well, I’d better go, I’ve got a stack of marking I’ve got to get through.’
‘Before you go,’ asked Hanlon, ‘what do you think she’s doing?’
‘I think her debts have maybe finally caught up with her. If they have she could well be dead. Drug dealers can be quite unforgiving, maybe downright psychotic at times. I should know, I met enough inside. I can’t think of any other explanation. If I were you, I’d find out who her dealer used to be, see if she owed him any money still. I would guess, yes – a lot.’ He stood up. ‘Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.’
‘Thanks for your time.’
He left the café and her phone signalled a message. She looked at it, Murdo Campbell.
Her face was impassive as she read the text. It was the answer to her earlier question. Paul Wyre was guilty, not of actually lying, but of misrepresentation. His armed robbery was technically that: he had threatened a sixty-year-old woman in a newsagent with a steak knife. In Wakefield prison he’d been on suicide watch because he had been badly bullied by the other inmates.
The ‘hard man’ persona was just an act.
Wyre was a self-aggrandising fantasist. What a surprise, she thought, profoundly unsurprised. Well, he had that in common with Morag; they were made for each other. How much of what he had told her was just bullshit?
Well, she would have to find out.
Next on her to-do list was Peter Reiss, the student counsellor.
She found herself back in the Grassmarket, walking past the pub where she’d spent a couple of hours the other day and the eponymous publishing company where Lorna worked. She walked under a bridge that ran high overhead, with the tall buildings rising up on either side – it was like walking through a narrow dark canyon – into a street called the Cowgate. Just off this road she found a scuffed door with a brass plaque next to it, Edinburgh University, Student Advice Centre. It was open seven days a week; addiction and mental illness didn’t take weekends off. She opened the door and went in.
There was a tiny reception area with a desk and an enormous, old-fashioned photocopier. On cork boards on the walls were various posters warning against STDs, drugs, alcohol, racism, ‘cheap’ loans and various other things.
She could hear voices and then a woman with a lined face and dyed red and blue hair appeared through a doorway behind the desk.
‘Hello, can I help?’
‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Hanlon, here to see Peter Reiss.’
‘Oh, yes, he mentioned you.’ She had quite a strong Scottish accent. ‘Please, follow me.’
She led Hanlon down a narrow corridor, worn beige carpet, pale blue walls, into a small office. Reiss was tall and stooping, wearing a threadbare suit, with an eager to please face and a beard. As he sat down she noticed that he had a circular bald spot like a monk’s tonsure in the centre of his head. This time she recognised the accent easily. Reiss was a Londoner.
Briefly she told him why she had come.
‘Ah, yes, Aurora Cameron… I met her a few times. Luckily for you I remember her.’
‘Luckily?’
‘We’ve got thirty-three thousand students at Edinburgh University,’ he said. ‘If we say five to ten per cent of them have mental problems that need addressing… well, you can do the maths, and, as you can guess, we’re not over-staffed. I see a lot of students – she stuck in my mind.’
Hanlon digested this; she was interested in Reiss’s impressions of Aurora. ‘Can you tell me anything about her?’
Reiss scratched his bearded chin thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, I can. When I first met her, I didn’t believe she wanted to get better. You get a certain amount of time-wasters in rehab. I thought she was one of them. To be honest I considered shopping her to the Old Bill.’
‘How so?’
Reiss settled back in his chair. ‘Recently there’s been a dramatic rise in cocaine usage and therefore addiction amongst the student body. It’s very good quality, and it’s cheap. It’s flooding in. I would say that’s a good indication that it’s coming from the same source, the same supplier – well, that’s my opinion, which, may I tell you, is quite well informed,’ Reiss looked at her and she revised her opinion. With his old, cheap suit, dull tie, shoes in need of a polish and pot belly he looked dowdy and unimpressive. But Reiss’s eyes were hard and steady – he was, she decided, a bright guy who had sat through a lot of bullshit. If anyone was prone to lying it was an addict, and Reiss had probably seen a lot of people suffer and more than a few die.
‘Napier and Heriot-Watt – they are the other big universities here – are also seeing the same coke on their campuses. I think that a new dealer is targeting students, a new supplier, and I thought at the time Aurora Cameron was one of the conduits that was bringing it in. I thought, and I freely admit I was probably mistaken, that she was maybe recruiting likely student distributors to shift product.’
‘Is that why you remember her?’
‘To be honest, yes,’ he replied. ‘A lot of dealers have humongous habits to feed. I was kind of on the lookout for likely candidates, still am.’
‘Why did you think that she might be a dealer?’ Hanlon asked.
‘Two reasons: if you’ve got a drugs habit like she did and Daddy turns off the taps, which I gather he did, then to fund it, well, it’s crime or prostitution. And she wasn’t the sort to go on the game. The other reason is, I was tipped off.’
Hanlon was on the point of asking by whom, but he raised his hand to cut off the question. ‘I’m not saying who, before you ask. So, believe me, I kept a close eye on her during group therapy work. I saw a lot of her then. It wasn’t bullshit, she was genuine…’
‘But?’ asked Hanlon.
Reiss said, thoughtfully, ‘But, I still don’t know. If I were a new drug dealer looking to target students, I’d want someone on the inside giving me advice and helping me build up a network. Who better than Aurora Cameron? I thought that’s what she was doing. She’s very well connected socially, she’d add glamour to parties, people wanted her there…’ He laughed. ‘I may not look like it but, believe me, I know a hell of a lot about Edinburgh Uni night life, and then her glamorous boyfriend, the artist guy, with his Muirhouse mates, I kind of wondered about them as the main supply, although, maybe this is snobbery on my part, in their tracksuits, “jobby catchers” as they call those horrible tracksuit bottoms, I didn’t think they had the class. But I might be wrong…’
Reiss’s confident manner belied his words. ‘I’m not wrong,’ his look said.
‘And let’s not forget that her father is a very successful salesman. OK, he peddles art, not drugs, but hey, selling is selling. Blood is blood. A lot of things seem to me to be inherited: drug addiction, alcoholism, success.’ He sighed. ‘But anyway, it looks like I was probably wrong about her.’
‘She got better.’
‘Well, she’s not currently using. John Griffiths, her tutor who was instrumental in bringing her in, has seen her a lot at various drug and alcohol rehab meetings and she’s helping others too. That shows commitment, so I guess she wasn’t dealing and was just a heavy user. Any more questions?’ He looked up at the clock on his wall. ‘I can give you three minutes.’
‘What’s Griffiths like?’ she asked.
Reiss considered the question. ‘He does a lot of good, steering students towards help. I see him occasionally at NA or CA meetings. He gets a kick out of it, but I suppose that’s no bad thing.’ She nodded; hardly a ringing endorsement, but reasonable. Now for his colleague.
‘Oh, one last question, do you know Paul Wyre?’
Reiss threw his head back and laughed heartily. ‘That knobhead! Mr “I’m so tough”… Give me strength. He couldn’t fight his way out of a damp paper bag. Seriously, I think he’s a wanker.’ He laughed again. ‘I hope I haven’t been too evasive there. That should answer your question.’
She stood up. ‘Yes, it does. Well, thank you very much for your help, Peter.’
She drove back to the hotel, collected the dog and headed off in the car to the village of Cramond. She parked and walked the dog down to the seashore. The rocky beach was deserted. Sunday afternoon, grey and depressing. She stared awhile at the water and the seabirds; it made her feel homesick for Argyll. It was a peculiar sensation. She had never really felt that before about anywhere, including London, where she had lived for four decades.
She wasn’t sure she liked the feeling. In her mind she heard Dr Morgan saying, ‘It’s because you’re beginning to heal – you’re beginning to feel emotions like most people do instead of burying or denying them.’
I know, I know, she thought. She knew it was her mind, be it guilty conscience or subconscious that made her think so much of Dr Morgan, but it was getting so strong she couldn’t ignore its prompting much longer. Yes, I’ll make an appointment to see you. Back at your chi-chi Hampstead practice. We do have a lot to discuss.
She sat on a rock overlooking the Firth of Forth and threw a stick into the water for Wemyss. The dog was a strong swimmer and loved the water; he would retrieve the stick, bring it back to Hanlon, who would throw it back, seemingly endlessly.
To take her mind off herself she hunted around on the shore and then she sat the three stones she had chosen up on a flat rock to represent her suspects in the missing Aurora case.
First: Griffiths.
The evidence surrounding him: Morag McMillan’s book, which damned him as ‘an evil bastard’ and manipulative. Then the unknown girl from Newcastle claiming that Aurora was having an affair with him and that he was violent to women.
The motive? Frightening Aurora off in case he lost his job for sleeping with her? Had he killed McMillan for the same reason?
The evidence against him being involved: Swinson and Reiss both thought he was a stand-up guy. Quite frankly, she valued their opinions a lot more than Morag’s or this unknown girl. He genuinely seemed to care about student welfare. He did not appear to be violent, despite the anonymous tip-off. Could he be a wolf in sheep’s clothing or simply the sheep he appeared to be?
She looked at the next stone. Tall and slender. This represented Wyre.
The evidence against him: he slept with students – that wasn’t rumour, that was fact. He could lose his job over it. Definitely would, according to Swinson. He also had a track record of violence – he’d been in prison. Even though he had bigged his crime up, he was still a man who was prepared to threaten a woman with a knife. Reiss didn’t find him intimidating but Reiss, despite outward appearances, was a lot tougher than he looked, and from what she was beginning to learn of Aurora, she was a lot weaker than she seemed.
His motive? He didn’t seem to have one. If he had been having a relationship with Aurora, Hanlon would have bet that he would have discreetly boasted about it. She was beautiful; Wyre would have wanted everyone to know he had had her. She could see why he might have wanted to kill Morag, but Aurora?
And the argument for the defence? Lack of motive and deep down she didn’t believe that Wyre would have the balls to hurt anyone. He could look scary, he was capable of waving a knife about, but, deep down, it was bluster.
The third stone represented the unknown. Wyre had said that he wondered if Aurora had been threatened by drug dealers to whom she owed money. Hanlon thought that was plausible. The stone could be a drug dealer; equally it could be Luke. He had the Muirhouse crime connections; Reiss could easily be wrong about the drug source. And artists were notoriously devoid of sympathy or empathy for others; their selfishness, particularly with women, was notorious. She hoped Luke was nothing to do with anything bad happening to Aurora, but she certainly wasn’t ruling it out.
And how did any of the above relate to the attack on her?
Well, everyone agreed that Aurora had connections with drug dealers, either as a customer or, possibly, as a dealer herself. Her supplier could well panic, might have had nothing to do with her disappearance but feared being dragged into an investigation. Part of Hanlon almost hoped they would try again. For her it was unfinished business. She wanted to be handing out violence rather than receiving it.
Well, for now she had achieved as much as she felt she could chasing the university end of things. Time to chase the drugs angle. That, as both Reiss and Wyre had suggested, was the most likely explanation for Aurora’s panic-stricken disappearance. Her ex was the person most likely to provide a name.
She picked up her phone and called Luke.
‘Hi, it’s Hanlon. You said you had some info for me on Aurora. When can I come round tomorrow?’
‘Umm, let me think.’ There was a pause. ‘Have you thought about me painting you?’
‘No, Luke.’ She let him hear the exasperation in her voice; she hoped he hadn’t been lying about Aurora. ‘I’m busy trying to find your ex. What time tomorrow?’
‘Let me check my diary.’ There was a pause. ‘Let me see… five p.m. suit you?’
‘Perfect, see you then.’
You’d better not be lying to me, Luke, she thought as she walked back up to where she’d parked her car. I’m not in the mood.