A Wife Worth Dying For

by Wilson Smillie

  ‘It’s feasible,’ said Dr Flowers. ‘Have they been followed up?’

  ‘No. I got fixated on the J entry in her diary. Still, there was no obvious J in her contacts. The messages she was receiving weren’t from anyone in her contacts list. Still, I’ve assumed they were from J because they match the format of messages on my phone. Gavin Roy said we’d not find him by email address or phone number, which makes some sense now. Why use a super-sophisticated messaging app but leave your own phone number clear in the contacts?’

  ‘So, J doesn’t want you to waste his time chasing ghosts by calling all her numbers,’ said Flowers. ‘Following that logic would rule out her contacts list.’

  ‘Back to the lyric,’ Carter mused. ‘If it’s not the lyric, but it’s the song title, then there’s a connection between the stocking and Alice, which means there is a connection between Kelsa and Alice.’

  ‘Make me a match,’ Flowers said. ‘Are there stockings in Alice’s evidence?’

  ‘No, she was wearing tights when she was attacked. We have them.’

  ‘Can you connect any of the evidence you have from Alice with Kelsa?’ Dr Flowers asked the question he was thinking. ‘Find me a find, catch me a catch.’

  Carter was still trying to arrange the pieces of the lyrics in his head.

  ‘He’s taunting you.’ Dr Flowers said. ‘He wants to be caught, but only by you.’

  ‘And how does your psychology training explain that?’ he asked, reasonably. ‘Why would a rapist want to be caught? He could just hand himself in, save us the bother of chasing him.’

  ‘It’s a type of quiz game,’ she laid it out. ‘But if no one else knows it’s a game, how can he prove his prowess at it?’

  ‘Why me?’ The question had puzzled him ever since he found the little yellow Jiffy bag lying on his table.

  ‘Kelsa is the obvious answer.’ Dr Flowers told him what he suspected but had to hear from her. ‘He expects you’ll be humiliated and he’ll be revelling in your pain. But that won’t be enough for him. He’s stacking up the levels. Which is why he’s entered your house.’

  ‘Is this guy really a psychopath?’

  ‘Be careful, Leccy,’ she warned. ‘You’re stepping over the threshold into the professional minefield of published academic papers on new theories of criminal mental derangement. A holy place where accolades from peers matter more than taking madmen off the streets. We’ll never really know until we meet him face to face, but my gut says yes.’

  ‘Why would Kelsa get involved with someone like this?’ Carter asked, truly confused.

  ‘Psychopaths are not knuckle-dragging killers; they’re engaging, educated and highly sociable people with a low tolerance for the mundane. They’re also quick to anger and will tip over easily into extreme violence. She could readily fall for his charms and power.’

  ‘But we were married. Why would she put herself in that position?’

  ‘Maybe it happened before you two were a couple. What do you know about her ex-boyfriends?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Lisa! Nothing. And you can guess how I feel about that.’ Stupid, for not asking the questions while she was around to account for the answers.

  DI Mason wandered into the detectives’ room. Carter invited him into the pod.

  ‘Well,’ said Mason, making himself comfortable on a chair in the now very cosy meeting pod. ‘Is this our private gang? Cheryl says we’re all friends now, so that’s good. It’s only a matter of time till our rapist realises what he’s up against and hands himself in.’

  ‘Don’t forget Charli and Ellen,’ said Carter. ‘They’re doing all the hard work.’

  ‘What progress have you made, Sergeant, now that you have to report to me every few hours?’

  ‘Charli is taking a fresh look at the mobile analysis—’

  ‘You’re not as smart as you tell us you are, then?’

  ‘There’s been a development,’ Carter ignored the jibe. ‘Charli can call all the contacts on Alice’s phone, but I’d rather Ellen did it, so Charli can work with us.’

  ‘What’s this development, then?’

  ‘J may have raped another woman, but to be sure we need to look again at the evidence we have for Alice.’

  ‘A new victim?’ said Mason. ‘Can we interview her?’

  ‘No,’ said Carter. ‘She’s already dead and buried.’

  51

  Hugo

  The hotel was a twenty-minute drive from St Leonard’s. They’d all agreed what the next steps should be, which meant decamping the team to FOC Fettes. Rocketman was briefed, he had the resources available to keep the whole event legal. Carter had previously explained to Judith that his time to see Nathaniel meant he might not have much latitude during the working week. She took it in her stride and proposed the Braid Hills Hotel on Comiston Road as a suitable meeting place, south of Morningside and less than a mile from the Dunsmuir residence.

  ‘James always goes to his club after court. I won’t see him until later, if at all, so most weeknights I spend on my own. It is not what I imagined the middle-aged years of my life would be. I wasn’t prepared for how driven he would become in his desire to sit on the higher benches. He has sacrificed almost everything in pursuit of that goal. He deals with family matters only when he must.’

  Carter sat on a comfortable settee in the lounge area of the hotel. At his feet, Nathaniel entertained himself with the secrets of springs on his baby-bouncer-cum-rocker. His eyes were wide open, and bubbles of spit rolled their way down his chin. A waiter arrived and set out some cutlery in front of Carter and popped a small glass of white wine on the table next to Judith.

  ‘I’ve ordered you some hot food, Lachlan. I know you like beef. You must exist on ready meals and with James being James, inviting you to dinner is out of the question.’

  Judith was chatty and filled the void while he munched his way through a delicious medium-rare 10 oz rib-eye steak with hand-cut chips. He ordered a small IPA to wash it down.

  ‘I’m sorry if I was short with you yesterday, Lachlan. Dusting the cobwebs off stressful events has been a chore that our family has never mastered. In the silence of last night, I reminded myself that you are part of our family and entitled to know just what you got yourself into. Of course, in the normal run of life Kelsa would have been here to smooth off the rougher edges so you could digest it in your own time. But she is not, more’s the pity.’

  Judith wiped a tear from her eye and sat up with purpose. Carter realised that she was willing to drag long-buried secrets into the light for his inspection. Still, as he hadn’t prepared the list of questions that detectives are famous for when interviewing mothers-in-law, he started with the only one that came to mind.

  ‘James never really took to me. How did I upset him?’

  ‘He has become myopic as the years have rolled past,’ Judith replied in a bitter tone. ‘It’s hard to believe that he was once the life and soul around these parts in his younger years. The man I now share my life with is not the man I married – but this isn’t about me or my choices. When Kelsa introduced you that first time, James saw only a lowly sergeant in the police force. His prejudices coloured his judgement. He did not consider you as an individual and nor did he contemplate what ambitions in life you might strive for. Conversely, James thought Hugo Mortimer to be the epitome of who he would choose for his daughter to marry. Someone who had a media profile and was feted around town. In truth, Hugo was shallow, grasping and self-absorbed, and cut from the same cloth as James. Maybe that’s why they liked one another.’

  ‘I stood in James’ court one day, as a witness,’ Carter said, ‘after I started dating Kelsa. I found him sharp and irritable. My colleagues don’t like him either, but that’s another story too.’

  ‘James and Kelsa argued over you. He wanted her to stop seeing you. He suggested some names from his chambers and offered to act as a matchmaker. Kelsa was incandescent. It opened up all the old wounds between them.’

 
‘Matchmaker.’ The second time he’d heard the word today. But that was a coincidence, surely?

  ‘What did you think of Kelsa when you first met her?’ Judith asked. ‘I’m intrigued. The Kelsa I knew was inside our four walls, and I never pried into her life outside. Maybe I should have, and maybe I should have been more honest with you too, Lachlan.’

  Carter reached down and lifted Nathaniel out of his bouncer and held him in his arms, making eyes and cooing at him. ‘She had a big personality,’ he said. ‘I was drunk on our first meeting, but she approached me. I’ll spare you the details. Every time we met, it was like that first time; she gazed at me with an overpowering intensity. I was smitten. It was, for me, love at first sight. I soon learned that she thought the same about me and that shook me to my boots. I mean, I was just an everyday bloke making a living as a policeman. What was it that this incredible woman saw in me?’

  ‘Don’t play yourself down, Lachlan,’ Judith said. ‘You are everything Hugo wasn’t. She enchanted you, but she’d learned how to control that side of her personality, to a good degree. When she was much younger, the schoolboys used to stand outside the gate whistling. When she went out, they were like flies. It was her force, but it took her a long time to master it.’

  ‘Lesley Holliday said that Kelsa was devastated when things fell apart with Hugo,’ Carter said. ‘That it took years for her to ready herself for the world again. That seems a long time. What happened?

  ‘Men don’t really understand relationships.’ Judith had the hanky ready. ‘You seem to just shrug them off and move to the next one as if you’re changing a car. When Hugo moved to France, Kelsa expected she would follow. She held onto that dream for quite a while.’ The tears slowly trickled down Judith’s cheeks, and she wiped them away. ‘Even when I knew that Hugo was doing nothing to sustain the relationship, she held on grimly. You have no idea how hard it is for a mother to watch her daughter meltdown and know there’s nothing she can do to stop it. Kelsa heard on the radio that Hugo was getting married. He didn’t even have the decency to call and warn her before the broadcast. Her confidence shattered into a million little pieces.’

  ‘What happened after that?’ Carter felt he had to say something, but he knew there was more to come; a landslide, a tsunami, an earthquake, an asteroid, a void into which she fell. He was only just beginning to understand.

  The ping of his phone announced a text message just as Judith dropped her bombshell.

  ‘James got involved.’

  52

  Under Pressure

  ‘We’re looking for a sheer black stocking,’ Carter had explained to Rocketman by phone from St Leonard’s before he went to meet his mother-in-law for tea.

  Protocols had to be observed: requests written, reasons documented, unreasonable questions reasonably answered in the name of governance and compliance and indelible signatures committed to paper, all to get the full inventory of physical artefacts of Alice Deacon’s case removed from secure storage and placed in an airtight room deep in the bowels of FOC Fettes.

  Carter’s head spun after the conversation with Judith in the Braid Hills Hotel. But the ping added some urgency. Nathaniel had fallen asleep in his arms, and he kissed his son’s forehead as he tucked him up in his pram without betraying his thoughts to Judith. She began the walk back home, leaving him to ponder the tip of iceberg Kelsa rising up slowly from the depths.

  [2019-01-21:1938] I’m the cuckoo in your nest, and you know what cuckoos do. Your only chick has been snuffed out, Carter. Will you die never knowing why she did what she did? J.

  He read and re-read the message while standing at the northbound bus stop. Then it vanished from his phone before he could grab it.

  ‘Fuck it. Taxi.’

  Just after 8 p.m., he was in the kitchen at FOC Fettes blocking out Mason’s Weegie banter. The DI was in a buoyant mood.

  ‘The brass are pushing the boat out to sort the petty emotions of my sergeant, Dr Flowers.’ Mason stood on one side of the coffee machine deep underground at Fettes Operations Centre. ‘What’s his poison?’

  ‘Have you lost anyone close to you, DI Mason?’ Dr Flowers countered.

  ‘Aye, but I found them again. It’s all a bit touchy-feely, is it not?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ said Dr Flowers. ‘He’s sitting right next to you.’

  ‘In another time and place where the water of life flows, I think I could get him back on track without consulting an incomprehensible textbook that no psychology professional can agree with. Cheryl McKinlay wants regular updates on everyone’s progress, so, as part of the team, Lisa, working with me, him, Charli and Ellen, you’re accountable too whether you like it or not.’

  Waiting in the forensic suite’s kitchen, a problem appeared. DCI McKinlay was a senior signatory to the process but was uncontactable. DI Mason stepped in as deputy and signed his nuts off as the accountable officer, should someone grab the items and escape into the night.

  Even with signatures, the show wasn’t over. Duty scene of crime examiners brought each hermetically sealed bag from the secure storage area, placing them in numbered order on a table in the nominated room. Only then were the detectives allowed to enter: DI Mason, DS Carter, DC Garcia and Dr Flowers noted as interested observers. Rocketman joined them as the DCI-grade officer, and one CSE stood guard at the door. Ellen Podolski had declined the offer of a ringside seat because she was busy with family.

  ‘You’re looking for a stocking that matches the one here, in this bag?’ said Rocketman, holding it aloft.

  ‘Yes,’ Carter confirmed, scanning the thirty clear plastic bags on the table. He had told Rocketman on the phone what they assumed the second lyric meant, and he’d chuckled. ‘It had to be Elton John, eh?’

  Each bag contained one item: Alice’s Samsung phone; white knickers (ripped and soiled); black knickers (Kelsa’s, soiled); bra, skirt, top, jacket, handbag, lipstick, compact, brush, nail polish, house keys, tan tights (Alice’s, torn); and other items from pockets and hideaways, and, of course, an alien single black stocking (Kelsa’s) courtesy of Sergeant Carter (anxious). The silence was palpable, with no one daring to comment on what all could see.

  An absence of matching stockings.

  ‘Is this everything?’ Carter asked of anyone who might answer. Rocketman looked to his tech guarding the door, who nodded.

  ‘Seems like it, Leccy. We have other physical evidence such as swabs and DNA slides, but this accounts for wearables.’

  ‘Maybe our theory of the rhyme isn’t right.’ Carter looked to Dr Flowers for reassurance, but she shrugged her shoulders meaninglessly. He was on his own with this one. He thought back to the scene at the bridge where Alice was found. No shoes and the only other item visible her handbag hanging on a tree branch. It hadn’t been easy to recover.

  ‘Do we have a copy of the statement Dr Murray gave after she assessed Alice’s injuries?’

  ‘Not here, Leccy,’ said Mason. ‘A transcript will be in ICRS, but the paper will be in storage.’

  Rocketman turned to his Tech. ‘Can you find it in ICRS, please?’

  Tech nodded, ‘Yes, sir.’

  The written statement signed by Dr Murray appeared on the screen a few minutes later, and Carter found what he was looking for. ‘Here it is: “ligature marks around her throat”. Do we have a ligature or something that could be used as one?’

  Silence in the room confirmed not.

  ‘What about the tights?’ Carter asked. ‘Were they used to strangle her? Could we tell from cell transfer?’

  Tech piped up. ‘Sir?’ he addressed Rocketman, who nodded.

  He read a paragraph displayed on the screen. ‘Knickers and tights recovered from the graveyard – DNA and blood of the victim present, no other human organic material found. There’s an analysis of the soil and plants, is that important, sir?’

  ‘Not now,’ said Rocketman. ‘Leccy, tell us.’

  ‘He had the ligature with him. If he kept the liga
ture after he’d finished with her, how would he get it into evidence so he could text the rhyme? He wouldn’t rip off her tights to asphyxiate her, then put them back on. So either he still has the ligature, or it’s here somewhere. Her handbag. Is it empty?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Tech.

  Carter lifted the handbag in its clear cellophane and examined it carefully. The clip was closed for convenience. He opened the zip-lock of the evidence bag and took the handbag out. It was a Louis Vuitton, dark brown with a pink handle and shoulder strap, the distinctive LV logo covering the pure leather, a little scuffed at the corners, not new but serviceable. He opened the clip and looked inside: empty as Tech had said. There was an inner zip on one side, but the pouch was empty. Carter put the bag on the table and stuck his hand inside, running his fingers along the base, trying to lift it away. It was well made and resisted his efforts.

  Everyone watched him curiously, like an excruciatingly bad magician trying to pull the non-existent rabbit from the top hat. He turned the bag upside down, with his hand still inside, and pressed the bottom with his other hand.

  ‘Leccy,’ said Mason, beginning to feel the atmosphere in the room tighten. ‘I don’t think it’s there. He must still have it.’

  ‘One more minute,’ Carter said.

  He turned the bag back onto its base and examined the folded edges where the lining met the leather. Otherwise well-stitched, in one place it was slightly loose. He ran his fingers along for six inches or so.

  ‘I feel something inside the lining. But I can’t find the opening. Tongs, tweezers – something like that.’

  Everyone held their breath. Not wishing to relieve the pressure that had suddenly taken hold of the air and squeezed, Tech quickly returned with long thin tweezers. Carter slipped them carefully down the inside of the lining and pulled something out.