Thursday, 30th of November
Isla had been told to go to bed. Her mum and dad were staying over, and the kids were in the spare bedroom with them. The GP had come out and given her a sleeping tablet, well, five, to get through the next few days.
So she lay alone in the bed she had shared with her husband, as the world went on as normal outside. They had been married seven years, he was her husband, her best friend, dad to her children.
She wondered where Costello was right now. No one seemed to know.
She couldn’t get her head round that.
She stared at the ceiling, lying with the light on, her mind not really keeping up with the issues that everybody had brought up, how are you going to cope? She had no option but to cope. Her children would grow up, they would remember their dad. She’d make sure they knew him and the man he was.
And why he had died.
She stared at the ceiling again. There was a spider’s web up there, dancing.
She lay in the darkness and then cried her eyes out.
All that did was give her a headache and make her eyes sore. She had no emotion left, except anger. She could hear her mum and dad next door, talking quietly. They still had each other, in their sixties they could still lie in bed entwined in each other’s arms.
The pain of that stopped her breathing.
She felt she had nothing to say. She wanted to look after the kids but couldn’t look at them with their huge trusting brown eyes, ready to ask where Daddy was. When was Daddy coming home? The questions were bound to start coming and she didn’t have the heart to answer them. She didn’t have the heart, full stop.
It had been ripped out of her.
Her mum and dad were now settled in the youngest’s room and the kids were all piled in together.
Why not use the fourth bedroom? Her mum had asked, and got a dig in the ribs from her father. It was Donnie’s room, just for Donnie.
She got up, pulled on her dressing gown, a big fluffy white one that Donnie had bought her when Nathan had been born. He had wrapped it all up in paper, when she opened it in the hospital he’d had to take it back home as it was too bulky to go in any of the cupboards. And she was scared it might get lifted.
She brought it up to her face, smelling the scent of Donnie’s aftershave, the times she had lain on the sofa, on a Saturday night; her lying in his arms sipping a Prosecco, him sipping a beer and watching the football while she flicked through a magazine.
Little things, he was never one for the big gestures, but he was always there, always thoughtful.
She went to the next room, the small room that sat next to the box room. She undid the little hook at the top, a simple plain hook sitting in a brass ring. She twisted it round, lifting it off, the door swung open and she closed it behind her very quietly. She turned on the light switch, the tiny room lit up like Wembley Stadium. Books, a laptop, a sound system and one lazy boy easy chair, with a blanket and a pillow on it.
Donnie’s den.
He would come in here when he was on night shift and he needed a kip during the day. He’d lie there with his headphones and watch a film on the laptop or listen to his music, a whole wall of his favourite CDs, keeping them away from small sticky hands. And then his vinyl collection, his greatest love: Hotel California, Dark Side of the Moon, Going For The One and every one of David Bowie’s thirty-five albums. His adoration of the sidemen, the unsung heroes.
She sat on the arm of the recliner, and reached over to put on the sidelight, then got up to put the overhead light off. The room changed character totally, calming now, relaxing. Lying down on the chair, she pressed the button to drop the back, the footrest coming up under her legs and she pulled the blanket round her.
This was his favourite place, her eyes scanned round at the picture of her and the boys pinned to the corkboard, a list of stuff she wanted him to pick up at Argos for Christmas, before they sold out or it got too busy.
Christmas. How the hell was she supposed to cope with Christmas?
Without Donnie? Two words she could never imagine saying together.
She closed her eyes, she had to be strong. Or she’d fall apart, she didn’t really have to do anything, her husband had been killed. She could see herself in the car, him driving the kids squealing in the back, him winding them up and her trying to get them to calm down. They had driven up to Inveruglass many times. The last time the boys had climbed to the viewing point with the Gaelic name.
How do you say that, Daddy?
No bloody idea.
The youngest had climbed up on Donnie’s shoulders for a lift, she had taken the eldest by the hand, then had walked up to the top step of the viewing platform where they had a clear view right down the loch. They had sat together. Their hands intertwining automatically, she had had her gloves on, it had been cold. The boys had climbed up and down the steps, the big boy helping the wee boy, punting him up, helping him down. Near the bottom, Donnie had set off to retrieve them.
Donnie had loved the place. Why would he go there, why did he take Costello?
He had liked her, she was still missing. There was still a chance that she would be found alive. At that moment Isla hated her, she was single with no kids: she could die and nobody would notice.
Was she on the run after killing Donnie? She doubted it.
So he had gone there, met her and been murdered. His body taken up the road to Tyndrum, thirty miles north, dumped in a lochan. Thrown away like trash.
By whom? And why?
He wasn’t doing anything official, it was something he’d had an idea about. He would have written something down or noted something on his computer. He had a brown notepad somewhere, he was always scribbling here and there.
There would be something in this room.
She was wide awake now.
She looked over at his desk, she could start up his computer, and find nothing. She would do that later. Closing her eyes, she thought of him sitting in his boxers, on the recliner, his mobile in his hand. They had been phoning each other, Donnie and Costello. How often, she had no idea. He had taken the phone out the room, when she had been present, nothing unusual in that, she had no interest in his work, apart from how it affected him.
So he would be in here, on his phone, making notes, even something he typed up on his computer, he would do that while he was on the phone. She glanced over at the bin, it was empty, of course. She had emptied it when things were normal and Donnie was going to walk back in the door.
She closed her eyes and asked Donnie for help. If he was out there in the ether, she needed his help right now. His name was being dragged through the shite and she wasn’t going to let that happen. She thought about the last time she saw him, she was going through the Argos catalogue making a list. Why was she thinking of that? She had a nice notebook with flowers on it, that was her Christmas notebook. Donnie had a simple reporter’s notebook with a spiral of wire across the top, usually with a blue biro rammed through it.
He had been using it to get the measurements for the new tiles for the bathroom floor, well, that wasn’t going to happen now. But he did use that notebook a lot, she had seen him here, on this recliner, phone jammed in between his ear and shoulder, notebook on his thigh, his foot up on the chair, scribbling. She had been telling him that his dinner was ready, he had nodded. It was cold by the time he had come through. When had that been? Last week? The week before?
She didn’t know why but she knew now that he had been talking to Costello.
She scanned the small bookcase in the room, and there it was, lying on top of The Godfather DVD collection she had bought him for Christmas last year. She reached over and picked it up. He had written his name on the front page, like a school kid, he had even underlined it and added a doodle of a motorbike.
She flicked it open feeling like a spy, intruding on his life. There was nothing in it. Of course he had torn out the pages with the notes for the bathroom tiles and stuck them on the tiler’s business card. There were little fragments of paper at the top, where he had pulled pages out, recently from the fact that the tiny pieces were still trapped in the spiral. Even as she had moved it from the bookcase back to the seat, some had fallen on the carpet, she picked them up carefully and laid them out on top of his keyboard, wary to lose anything that might have been part of him.
Then she looked back at the pad, flicked the top page over, letting it fall in behind the rest. He had been using it, she could see the indents of his writing, the circular doodles that he did when he was bored, or thinking, circles that would pair up and morph into motorbikes.
They had been watching that forensics programme together where the farmer had placed a bomb under his own car, then slashed himself and then shot his neighbour dead making out his neighbour had been targeting him. Donnie had pondered why the farmer didn’t move house. But Isla could remember the CSI had held the notepad to an oblique light source and read the indents of the threatening letter that the neighbour was supposed to have written. She went over to the desk and switched on Donnie’s desk lamp. She could make out a few letters, see the individual pen grooves of the doodles.
She turned the light out and went back, so the only source of light in the room was the small Ikea desk lamp. She moved the pad back and forth, seeing numbers and cms, that was him making the measurements for the tiles, but there was something else.
A name. It looked as though Donnie had written it and then gone over it again and again, doodling over the letters as he was on the phone. She could make it out, more than a few letters. She fired up the computer, feeling better now that she was doing something, she Googled the name, variations of the same, the search engine brought back a few possibles. Nothing that matched exactly what she had thought she had read. But one entry caught her eye, not the bar at the top but in the two lines of small print underneath.
And then, at the bottom a name she was more familiar with, that was scribbled all over this page. It was just Donnie, being Donnie.
Oscar Duguid, believed drowned, search called off. Leaving a wife Abigail and a daughter Mary Jane. Isla, read that again; Abigail and Mary Jane, Kelvindale Bridge, NC 500, phone land registry, harbour master and Jennifer. Jennifer was common enough but not Abigail or Mary Jane. Neither were particularly common names. Donnie had been ranting about that, the name of the girl Braithwaite had killed though Donnie thought they would have a tough time proving it. Braithwaite, who was arguing it was all his wife’s fault, the wife who had conveniently fallen from the top of a high building. Not enough to be not guilty but enough for there to be reasonable doubt in the mind of the jury, he would be a good witness, he might get off.
She couldn’t sit here and do nothing.
Anderson sat at his kitchen table, the house was quiet for once, just a steady beat of music from upstairs somewhere and the rasp of Nesbit’s snoring. The blank page of his iPad was staring at him. His head was hurting just thinking about what Costello had got herself caught up in. He was concerned about her safety, more concerned than he dared to voice, even to himself. He had seen the worried look on Walker’s face, even the fiscal had stopped fooling himself that the texts had been coming from her. They could have been sent by anyone who had got her phone off her. And nobody knew who that was.
But now she had come out of hiding and was back on the road, having purchased a new phone.
He wished he could feel a sense of relief in that, but, and there was a but, it wasn’t her.
He called up the map of Loch Lomond, tracing the route to Tyndrum which followed the West Highland Way. Just as the Bealach followed the 500? Anybody who wanted to be there, had a reason to be there, hiding amongst the tourist traffic.
He thought about the others, the pile of paperwork on the rapes. Mitchum had given him a week. He was so fucked up over this he hadn’t given a thought to Sally and to Gillian. Was there a connection as Morna thought?
He tried to put that to the back of his mind, making himself think about the An Ceann Mor viewing point. Somebody had chased the student down. Told him his car was leaking fluid? Maybe Cowan had already stopped due to the noise made by the tin of ball bearings. There must have been some kind of chase, the boy trying to get away and he was pursued through the trees. His attacker caught up with him, battered him in the face then slit his throat. Then what? Why take him so many miles away? A journey that would take over three, maybe four hours and then dump him on a remote mountain pass?
Was it because he was going there anyway? Not out of convenience, but for ease of explanation if their vehicle was spotted en route. Years ago the body should have lain at the pass until the road reopened in the spring but now there was no presumption of isolation. Why roll the body out the car and into a gully? Were they too weak to take it any further? Yet they took the body from the woods to the lay-by two hundred miles north? Tired? Injured? A different person? Or a lack of time? A woman?
Anderson pushed that thought away and looked again at the screen. Or was he pushed for time? Would his tardiness be noticed, and remembered by a third party? There had been many places, better places, to leave the body on the way up. Places where it would not have been found.
It had taken them three months to find Sharon Sixsmith.
So why there?
And found by who?
It was reported a body was found.
He swiped to read the report on the finding of Kieran Cowan, confirming there was a huge part of the story missing. Who had called DCI Patrick? The report said nothing and Patrick said even less. The ones that shall not be spoken of. Small men of few words, short hair and wide necks. Anderson knew who trained in places like the Bealach. Those who needed the bleakest, toughest landscape the British Isles could offer. He knew who and what they were, and he guessed that Alastair Patrick had been one of them. A small lithe Glasgow man with a chip of ice in his eyes, that man would blow your head off and would feel no compunction about doing it.
And that took a certain kind of moral toughness.
Anderson needed Cowan to pull through for him and tell him what happened on that hill, with the blood and the heroin and the alcohol. He had very nearly escaped.
But what of Costello?
He closed his eyes. The music stopped, Nesbitt woke up. A deathly silence fell on the house, just as he had made the decision to go north for some peace. Morna had been pleased of course, Brenda slightly less so.
He opened his eyes wide, startled by the sudden thought that he was leaving his family here, while George Haggerty was still on the loose. At least Mathieson was not taking those photographs at face value and was finding difficulty in tracking the private detective agency who had any records of that assignment. Anderson wondered if it was all an elaborate set-up for George’s alibi. He was the only person who really benefitted. Valerie Abernethy was ignoring Mathieson’s calls to a meeting, which was a stupid thing to do. Archie thought she was lying drunk in a hotel room somewhere, he was torn between trying to help her, and risking being kicked in the teeth again.
George, of course, had used his charm. Over the phone he admitted he had gone out for a walk the evening before he went up to see his dad in Port MacDuff. He had indeed popped in to see Valerie at the hospital and it was true that she had left the hospital at that time with him. The hospital was less than a mile from the house, so what was so odd about that? The other pictures did not show what they looked like. Just innocent hellos and goodbyes.
Valerie had disappeared now.
George said he had no idea about that.
Anderson thought that George Haggerty was a liar. The wee shitty liar that Archie Walker had been talking about.
His phone rang. He answered it immediately. At first he didn’t recognize the voice.
‘I need to show you something.’ Whoever she was sounded upset.
‘Sorry?’ He was slow to catch on.
‘It’s Isla McCaffrey. I need to show you something.’
‘Oh Isla, I’m so sorry about Donnie.’ He tried to think. ‘I was about to go up north tomorrow so I could pop—’
‘Were you? Why?’
‘On business. I heard about your husband.’ To his own ears it sounded beyond futile. He hadn’t known the young man. He had hardly given him a thought since he knew that Costello might have broken cover.
‘Can you call in here, please?’ she interrupted.
‘Do you still have your parents there, are you alone?’
‘They think I’ve lost the plot but there’s something here I need to show you. Now.’
‘There’s a name here.’ It was three o’clock in the morning and he was studying a single piece of paper under a light, holding it at an angle so he could read the shadows and indentations. He was also trying to ignore the footsteps of Isla’s parents in the hall. Three times they had knocked on the door, asking if everything was OK. ‘Earl somebody?’
‘Earl Slick, he was one of Donnie’s heroes. That has nothing to do with it, it’s that bit at the top we need to look at. I think he was on the phone to Costello and making those notes at the same time. It must have been important, the way it’s scribbled down.’
Anderson sat down on the office chair, the exhausted young woman with red, puffy eyes sat in front of him. She explained where she got the paper from, her grief momentarily lost in her enthusiasm.
‘He was on the tail of these guys or something.’
‘On the trail of Earl Slick? Who is this Earl Slick? He has underlined that more than once.’ He could see himself taking notes on the phone, receiving a lot of information, writing it down then, as the connections were made, his pen would come back to the important point, identifying it so it did not get lost in the page of scribbles. So who was Earl Slick?’
‘Well, he’s most famous for being David Bowie’s sideman but—’
Something jolted in Anderson’s mind. ‘A sideman? Define a sideman for me, Isla?’
Her tired face creased, thinking. ‘Well, it’s a guy, a musician who always plays with another guy, usually more famous. The sideman is never a celebrity, but they are always there. Slick has been Bowie’s sideman for over twenty years and … Roger Pope with Elton and …’
‘A partnership that last years, one in the open, the other staying well in the shadows?’
‘Yes, but they are really good session musicians in their own right. They prefer to be in the background making money and making music, but never in the limelight. They just don’t want the fame.’ She stopped talking, looking at a signed picture of a spikey haired Earl Slick on the wall. ‘That was Donnie’s prized possession.’
Anderson let her talk, thinking that George Haggerty had stopped for Nicola Barnes when her car broke down. Somebody had come back to rape her. Had Haggerty called him and told him there was a tasty wee morsel waiting for him. And settled back to give himself a good alibi, while the other man took what pleasure he wanted. And that begged the question, what did George Haggerty get in return? The murder of his wife and child?
He blinked, confused. For some reason Oscar Duguid crossed his mind; the friend of George’s who had drowned. No body ever found.
Anderson looked back at the paper in his hand, gratified to see what was in front of him; Donnie and Costello, two police officers had, in some way, got to the same conclusion. ‘Interesting. We need every bit of information on this. Jennifer. Jennifer? Somebody has asked me about a Jennifer but not a Jennifer Rhu.’
Isla pointed to the computer screen. ‘That is, or was, the Jennifer Rhu.’
‘A yacht? Isla, Donnie would be so proud of you.’
How far had Donnie and Costello got? Definitely suspicious of the main man and the sideman. George and A N Other. Strangers On A Train for the modern age.
But did they have any proof? Or was Costello trying to make sense of all this. He scanned over the indented shadows on the document. NC 500 was an obvious one so his brain latched onto that; the North Coast 500. Where the victims on Morna’s list were clustered? Clustered was the wrong word. The victims had been using the same roads, because they were the only roads there. Not the evidence it appeared to be, unless it was written there for another reason that only Costello and McCaffrey knew.
He asked Isla to find Kelvindale Bridge on Google maps.
‘Interesting,’ said Anderson, looking at the image.
‘Is that not near where the woman and the boy were killed?’
‘It depends what you mean by near? But yes, within twenty minutes’ walk.’
The only people that might know how far these leads went, well, one of them was dead and the other one was missing.
He hoped.
And he needed Mathilda McQueen. He had to get Mathieson on board. He picked up his phone and called Bannon, asking him what CCTV they had requested from Balcarres Avenue and then told him it might be better to get the cameras around Kelvindale Bridge, out of interest. Bannon swore at him for waking him up. Then asked why.
‘I’d just do it if I was you.’
‘If you are holding back information, Anderson, Mathieson will hit and not miss.’
‘I’ve been mauled by worse than her. Get the CCTV and let me know if you get anything. You can keep the Brownie points.’
By nine a.m. Anderson was packed and keen to start his journey north to meet the clumsy Morna and renew his acquaintance with the quiet man. The weather forecast warned of foul driving conditions but so far his plans for an early start were being thwarted at every turn. He had been summoned to McCaffrey’s post-mortem. A copper at Govan had called in to say that he might have a lead on the missing female detective. Anderson dismissed it as he had all the others. Until he saw the contents of the link: an admission report of an unidentified female, taken into the QE 2 hospital early on Monday morning.
Over the next hour, he tried to get hold of a PC Turner, eventually tracking him down in the canteen at Govan. Turner had picked her up while on the night shift after being contacted by the Sally Army. He related the story of her injuries, her location, her lack of ID and lack of memory.
‘Really? No memory.’
‘Nope.’
‘Age?’
‘Like in the report, about 60, I’d say. Stinking with drink.’
Anderson’s heart fell.
‘She has no idea who she is but drinks black tea.’
Anderson spent the next forty minutes on the phone to the hospital, thirty-nine of them on hold, thinking. How injured she had been. Lucky to be alive.
Was it Costello?
The music stopped. ‘A friend had come to collect her.’
‘What friend? To where?’
The hospital had no idea. She had signed herself out on the basis there would be a private package of care requested by her new consultant, as yet no request had been received.
Anderson wondered if he was getting the runaround. ‘Do you have a name?’
‘Well, it was a woman.’
‘A name?’
‘No, try your luck with the ward but you’ll get nowhere if you are not a relative.’
‘Cheers.’
Costello had no relatives. So who had it been? Another twenty minutes on the phone to the ward and he got a nurse called Hannah. And Hannah had a name, Theresa Neele. He doubted that. Anderson asked Turner to look at a picture he was about attach to a text.
He heard the phone beep. ‘No, not her.’
Anderson’s heart fell again.
‘It could be her mother?’
Anderson put down the phone. And dropped his face into his hands, he had no idea how stressed he had been. He let out a long slow breath. She was out there somewhere, under medical care. Now they knew where to look. She’d lost her memory.
Silly cow. He wiped a tear away.
Thank God. He needed to call Archie but the phone rang instead. He swiped it thinking it would be Turner, or Hannah, with some detail remembered.
It was Morna returning his earlier call. He said he was stuck in Glasgow but would set off as soon as he could, and he’d like to meet straightaway. She told him to come round to the house now that she had been liberated from Kieran’s bedside. He was on the mend and would be available for interview soon.
‘It looks like he’s going to be OK in the long run. His parents are with him now but don’t hurry to interview him as he has retrograde amnesia.’
Anderson smiled. ‘That’s OK.’ He then asked exactly where Port MacDuff was. The answer didn’t exactly fill him with wonder.
‘Port MacDuff? Think Ullapool but with slightly less charm. And more rain.’
That was hard to imagine. He had once heard Ullapool described, with infinite sarcasm, as the entertainment capital of Western Europe.
She had asked if he knew where Fearnmore was. ‘Where Loch Torridon meets the Sound. It looks out onto Rona.’
The relief at knowing Costello was around somewhere had lightened his mood, tempting him to say, ‘Rona? Never met the woman,’ but held his tongue. Morna sounded very earnest, she might not have a sense of humour. ‘Port MacDuff, right on the coast. You know Applecross.’
‘Well, I know the road by reputation.’
‘Yeah, you’d better come the long way round.’ she cautioned, ‘unless you have a 4 × 4 and even then, we have snow up here already and there’s more forecast.’
‘Was that not where your young man was found, up on the Bealach …?’ He made a mess of saying it.
‘Bealach? Yes indeed.’
Anderson saw an opportunity, ‘Who found him then? If it’s inaccessible at this time of year.’
‘DCI Patrick.’
‘Why was he there?’
‘You need to ask him,’ was the confusing reply, and she offered to book him a room at the Exciseman for that night. He said that would be very nice and she gave him the address. Then the line went quiet. Then she asked, well stated, ‘You’ve looked at my list, haven’t you? Do you think there’s something there? That’s why you want to come up here.’
‘Yes,’ he thought, but my reasons are not yours. Then he asked her slowly, what she thought had happened to Sharon Sixsmith.
Her reply startled him. ‘You should start with Jennifer Argyll, then Nicola Barnes then think what happened to Gillian Witherspoon. They had the same injuries to their shoulders, and the other one, now that she’s dead. Patient confidentiality dies with them. They told me about the shoulder reconstruction she had.’
‘What dead one? Gillian?’
‘No, Sally Logan. Braithwaite. The one who dived off the top of the building, or was pushed, you know the one who—’
Out of the mouths of babes. Anderson felt his throat go dry, this girl had no idea she was talking about the grandmother of Anderson’s grandchild. But she was doing what a good detective would do. He thanked her for the information, he’d explain the rest when he met her. Then he said, for curiosity, testing her, ‘Just one more question. Who was Jennifer Rhu?’
‘Not a who, a what. That was the boat that went on fire, killed Oscar Duguid.’ She said it with the ease of familiarity. Of course she would know, it was a small place. ‘He was a pal of George, but you’ll know that.’
‘Yes. I do, George Haggerty. Do you know him well?’
‘Friend of my husband. Why?’
‘Just that the name Jennifer Rhu came up, but you solved that mystery. I’ll see you later.’ He swiped his phone off.
Morna Taverner was on the ball, he’d have to watch himself with that one. She reminded him of Costello.
But now, he had a post-mortem to go to.
Anderson stayed outside of the post-mortem suite, he had been late anyway. On his way into the hospital, he had flashed his card about and eventually tracked down ‘Hannah’ who was terrified she had done something wrong. It took all of Anderson’s charm to get the whole story from her. She had been trying to track down anybody who might know her patient, then she had traced a friend of Jack O’Hare. And she had been called Theresa, Theresa Neele.
The name was vaguely familiar.
Anderson had Googled Theresa Neele, and got Theresa Neale, the name of Agatha Christie’s husband’s mistress and the name Agatha had used when she had disappeared in 1926, claiming loss of memory.
Sweet.
Hannah gave a brief description, tall, long dark hair tied in a bun, well spoken. From the procurator’s fiscal office, she’d had a card.
It was close enough for Anderson; Valerie Abernethy had taken Costello away.
Abernethy had spun a good story, giving Hannah the impression they were going to a private clinic, but had no idea where and Anderson knew that Costello was now behind a big iron curtain called patient confidentiality. She had effectively disappeared again.
And now so had Valerie Abernethy.
By the time he went into the mortuary itself, the post-mortem of Donnie McCaffrey was over.
‘I am not repeating it all just for you,’ said O’Hare. ‘He died of a single stab wound, having suffered five but only one was fatal. Everything else was staged. The cocaine – none in his system. The alcohol – none in his system. He was a clean young man who clearly got involved in a situation. And Mathilda wants you to call her. George Haggerty was stopped for another traffic violation, speeding again.’
‘You working for Traffic now?’
‘No, but good news travels,’ said the pathologist, ticking off boxes on a very long piece of paper. ‘She called as she knew you would be here. There was blood found in the boot of his car, it was deer blood so don’t get excited. But the sample picked up some orange tri-lobar fibres and that pinged with something the lab in Inverness has found. I hear you are going up there. And if you weren’t, you bloody well are now. Fibres in Haggerty’s boot match the fibres on the Bealach boy’s clothes. Not often Mathilda gets to pass on good news so I thought I’d steal her thunder.’
‘He had an offcut of carpet on the floor of his boot,’ Anderson remembered. ‘Orange.’
‘And it will be universally available, I bet. He’s giving us the runabout, Colin.’
‘They are giving us the runabout.’
O’Hare’s pen paused. ‘Are you onto something?’
‘As you would say, a tentative yes.’
‘Did you call Valerie Abernethy about a woman in the QE?’
The pathologist shook his head. ‘No, I called Archie’s house and she answered the phone. Did she not pass the message on?’
‘It’s fine,’ said Anderson thinking how marvellous it must be to work with the dead, whose capacity to think and be devious was extinct. Just how easy was that?