Sunday, 3rd of December
Costello was in her hospital bed, sitting up like a posed doll, stiff against the pillows. The bruising around her eyes had blackened. Her hair was sticking up. She looked like a drunk raccoon.
She was wondering when the pain would cease when the door opened. A tall blond man walked in followed by a small man, better dressed, with salt and pepper hair. OK, maybe not better dressed but he carried his clothes better, as if he owned them. With the taller man, it was the other way round.
‘So here you are,’ DCI Colin Anderson said, not keeping the bite of anger from his voice. Just because she wasn’t fit enough to hear it, didn’t mean that he wasn’t going to say it.
‘How’s Valerie?’
‘Three vertebral fractures, both femurs broken. She’s in Raigmore.’
‘Did you really think it was me?’ asked Costello.
‘I hoped,’ answered Anderson. ‘Especially when she went over the cliff.’ He resisted the urge to lean forward and pat her on the head. The fracture at the rear of her skull was covered by a dressing. He had seen the film now, Costello running forward to help a fatally wounded McCaffrey. Not hearing the second man, Taverner, arm raised ready to bring a tyre lever down on her head. O’Hare said she had been lucky. She had her hood up and a hat on under that. The cushioning had saved her life.
Costello’s eyes looked at Anderson then to Walker, back to Anderson. ‘And who are you, exactly?’ She wasn’t laughing; there was no sarcastic humour in her face.
Now it was Anderson and Walker’s turn to look at each other.
‘You two are so easy to wind up.’ She smiled. ‘Getting a bit of memory back every day.’
‘I’ve brought you some grapes,’ said Walker, pulling up another seat.
‘How long have we worked together?’
‘Must be about twenty years, maybe more,’ said Anderson. ‘It seems like a life sentence.’ Injecting a sense of their normal relationship into a conversation. ‘How is your memory really? Do you remember resigning?’
Costello tried to shake her head, then stopped as it hurt so much.
‘You told the big boss to stick his job up his arse.’ Anderson said gleefully. ‘But Mitchum didn’t process it as he thought you …’
‘Weren’t serious?’
‘No, he thought you were barking mad. There will be an investigation but I think Police Scotland will have you back. So how is the memory really?’
She shrugged. ‘Patchy. It’s not so bad, living in this world in my head. Things are very clear, very cut and dry, I know the essence of somebody, nothing else. It’s useful.’ She chewed on her lip, looking out the window, a slow smile formed on her lips. ‘So Valerie got him. Our plan worked.’ She closed her eyes now, as if with that knowledge, she could sleep more easily. ‘She’s paying for me to be here you know.’
‘Well she can afford it, she’s going to inherit the house.’
Her eyes flashed open. ‘You were with me.’ Her forefinger drifted towards Walker’s face, seeing a small nod of agreement. ‘When we found the bodies. Haggerty killed them both.’
‘He couldn’t have, he was on the A9 at the time. He got his sideman to do it for him. Haggerty helped Taverner with the rapes. Taverner did Haggerty’s murders for him. As you guessed, he was in the garage all along.’
‘Bastard. I knew Haggerty was behind it. You lot were doing bugger all about it. So I did something myself. Poor Abigail, targeted by George after Oscar disappeared.’
‘You were very sure, on very little evidence.’
‘I was on the receiving end of his taunts. I have a very clear memory of that. I have a clear memory that he had persuaded you lot not to listen to me, he wanted to discredit me. Though I doubt he thought I’d get suspected of murdering Donnie. He must have loved that. You can’t protect yourself against gossip and lies, so in that way, he got me. And he got me good.’
‘Why were you there at the lochside? Whatever it was, you could have come to us,’ said Walker delicately. ‘We would have listened.’
‘You didn’t. You told me to get lost. All anybody could talk about was his alibi. Donnie was the only one who listened to me. And that got him killed.’ She blinked back a tear. ‘George was tailing me at times after Abigail’s death, I did tell you that. And what did you do? You told George.’
Anderson closed his eyes. Had he really done that?
‘George was off his work after the murders, he had all day to annoy me, and you lot were happy to stand aside and let him. I was following him as much as he was following me. Donnie and I were nowhere near careful enough. It had become comical almost, it made us forget how dangerous he was, and I will never forgive myself for that. But we had no choice. But you know …’ She was getting angry. ‘It took us ten minutes looking into George’s life up north to come to Neil Taverner as the man with the opportunity. Donnie and his love of the sidemen, he almost profiled Taverner before we got near him. An adoring wife who earns more than he does, whose value goes up as a mother, yet the father is not close to the child. You do my crime and I will do yours, not an uncommon thing when there is a long-term bond between two people. The bond between Taverner and Haggerty was much stronger than the bond between Taverner and his wife, or Haggerty and his wife.’
‘Costello? What were you doing at the lochside?’ Anderson asked again.
‘We met to go to the campsite, it’s only four miles up the road, and wait for Taverner to do his pick-up of the luggage. That was all. We met at the loch so we were only in one car, to look less conspicuous. But we didn’t think they were following us, we didn’t think.’
In hindsight, Anderson had thought it through. They hadn’t been as careful as they should have been. Costello had believed that Haggerty thought she would accept his warning off, but Haggerty had realized that she had taken it as a sign to freelance her investigation. He had made her more dangerous. Anderson might have told Haggerty that himself. Donnie had thought Cowan was Taverner and had followed him up to the viewing point. Cowan had been in the wrong place, wrong time.
Walker filled up the gaps. ‘So Taverner and Haggerty realized there were three of you and only two of them, so they placed a stop box on each vehicle in the car park. They came prepared to clean up the situation. As you were left alone, they presumed you were dead. Haggerty goes after Kieran, and waits for him to pull over. Taverner takes Donnie away from the scene and drives up north, as he was scheduled to do. You were in the grass bleeding. Haggerty had to retrieve your phones, mix the blood, spill a little cocaine, pour some drink around the scene. They wanted to destroy your reputation. Cowan made them panic, it made them careless.’
Costello settled back into the pillow on her chair. She closed her eyes, her eyelids pink islands in the bruised patches around her eye sockets. ‘I think I can see Donnie on the ground, I was coming up the hill, my thighs are sore because of the climb. I remember trying to get away. I ran forward to help but … Then I don’t remember. I was on the ground at one point. I tried to get up, I remember wet hands round my neck. There was a blow on the back of my head, not sure what happened then. I don’t recall much but being in here.’
‘You crawled away, through the undergrowth. You got out.’
Walker said, ‘The doctor explained your thinking brain shut off, your deep brain was looking for patterns, for safety. People do the weirdest things. So by the time you were picked up in the middle of Glasgow, you had changed, showered and gone back out. You left your car at Lochmaben Road.’
‘Where my grandmother used to live.’
‘You drove it there, ignoring the clatter of the ball bearings. You sat in the park then ran off when the police were called. Then you walked home, then out to Buchannan Street, we have you on CCTV. Do you know why you did that?’
She shook her head. ‘I have no idea.’
‘You could have come to me,’ said Anderson.
‘George was at your house, so what good would that have done me?’
And it was true, he’d lost count of how many times George asked him if he’d seen Costello.
And George had known she was onto him. He knew they could be intercepted and caught red-handed at a baggage pick up or drop and the one closest to Glasgow seemed most logical. He wondered how many times they had watched Costello and she had not moved, but when she did they were ready. She had been arrogant and stupid, and because of her, three wee boys would grow up without a dad.
‘Taverner was picking up and distributing drugs, mostly cocaine. The big bags, like a golf flight bag, well they contained the luggage for transportation to the different sites, and they were lined with old carpet, orange tri-lobular fibres. That puts a lot of connections together.’
‘So George wasn’t the rapist,’ asked Costello.
‘He wasn’t. He was the facilitator of the rapes. There’s a team on it now. They have already proven he knew Sally and that Haggerty and Taverner were in Glasgow when she was raped.’
‘But it was very useful for him to have us pursue him on something he was innocent of. The “Clapping Song” playing. He clapped at me at the funeral. So no I did not work it out, he told me. The clapping is in Sally’s notes, it’s in the case file of Gillian Witherspoon as well, and there will be more, there will be more out there. Haggerty clapped, Taverner raped, Haggerty probably watched.’ Costello thought about shaking her head again.
‘We think Taverner had a bad shoulder, there’s anecdotal evidence of a young woman throwing him at karate, breaking his shoulder. That might have annoyed him a bit.’
‘Easy for Taverner to drive around, early morning, late at night. He had a right to be everywhere. Woman walking, hiking, camping on their own.’
‘So it was all for money, and the nice little line they had running cocaine about the country. I wonder how many of their hikers are extremely regular. And sniff a lot.’
‘All small fry compared to the murder of Malcolm and Abigail.’
‘You were right about the MO. Haggerty came home the previous evening and drove in to the garage. I think Taverner was in the boot. Taverner stayed in the garage, then walked in the back door, killed them. The guy on the CCTV on Kelvindale path is the right height for Taverner, not for Haggerty. There is no DNA because of that outfit he wears, it’s like a boiler suit, with the name of the company on it. He killed them, slipped a jacket over his easily recognizable suit and left. Walked back to wherever he left his car. It wasn’t sophisticated, it wasn’t even that clever. It was merely effective.’
‘Haggerty had been using that path for years, he was a secretive man and the path had been closed from his end, so it’s likely that he “allowed” naughty Malcolm to open the path again knowing that it would give Taverner a way out in the early hours of that morning largely unseen. Nobody else knew about the path at the back, Haggerty would deny it. Mathieson and her team missed it, they didn’t know where to look, a small gap in an overgrown hedge. Heads will roll that the search team missed that.’
‘And Oscar Duguid? The first husband? What’s his role in all this?’ asked Costello.
‘I think something happened to Oscar Duguid when he heard about Mary Jane’s death. Her murder shocked him, just because he walked away from the marriage doesn’t mean he stopped loving his daughter, my daughter,’ said Anderson. ‘He thought he had left them comfortable and safe, his friend moved in as role of father and protector. He knew about the attacks on women, that was his insurance to keep them quiet about his disappearing act. They didn’t stop the attacks. Haggerty is a man of intense cruelty, Oscar was OK with faking his own death, but he must have had a serious rethink when Abigail was murdered. And maybe when he worked out what might have happened to Jennifer Argyll up at Dolphin Point. His Jennifer, thirty years before. That’s still under investigation. Lachlan McRae was the SIO on her disappearance.’
‘Where is he now? Oscar?’
‘DCI Patrick is saying nothing. You can attach electrodes to his testicles and you’ll get nothing out of him,’ said Anderson smiling.
‘Reading the reports. I fail to understand why Taverner’s body was washed out to sea,’ said Walker.
‘You had to be there,’ said Anderson blithely. ‘I’m more interested in the psychological hold that house held over them, it became a focus for memories. That’s why people have cenotaphs set in stone, I suppose, so their memories are also set in stone. Happy days at the lodge, the three boys growing up there. Then Jennifer Argyll went missing, Oscar’s heart was broken and from then on, it was all downhill.’
‘Memories, eh? Powerful but untrustworthy.’
‘They are useful,’ added Costello.
‘Well, I had better get home before I get forgotten about,’ said Anderson.
‘And I’m going to visit my sober god-daughter,’ Walker shrugged, ‘now that she’s therapeutically plastered.’
‘Oh very good,’ laughed Anderson. ‘I’m going home to a kitchen which is slightly busier than Sauchiehall Street in the Boxing Day sales.’
‘And does that not make you yearn for the ruggedly beautiful isolation of Dolphin Point?’ asked Walker.
Anderson appeared to consider it carefully. ‘Nope.’