Still Life

by Val McDermid

  ‘Somewhere between thirty and thirty-five. Does that help?’

  ‘At this point, we think the victim is one of two women. Three years ago, one would have been thirty-one, the other thirty-four. So no, it doesn’t help with ID, but it does confirm that we’re in the right ballpark when it comes to victims.’

  ‘If you can get a dental chart, you could make a positive ID. At some point, she’s lost one of her front teeth and had a titanium implant. It’s a good one. You probably wouldn’t have been able to spot it when she was alive.’

  Karen nodded in satisfaction. ‘That might make all the difference. What about the injury to the skull?’

  ‘I would say she’s taken a heavy blow to the back of the skull.’

  ‘Baseball bat? Pipe?’

  River shook her head. ‘I’d estimate something with a more clearly defined edge.’

  ‘What? Like a metal bar or a chair leg maybe?’

  ‘You know it’s not my job to speculate.’ She held up a hand to still Karen’s protest. ‘But yes, either of those things would be consistent with the injury. If I was a CSI, I’d check the work surfaces in the van. It’s possible that her head hit a sharp edge accidentally.’

  ‘Or it was hit against a sharp edge.’

  River shrugged. ‘I need to examine the injury more scientifically to give you clarity on that one. The only other thing I have for you is that we’ve extracted DNA from the skeleton and the hair and they match each other.’

  Karen scoffed. ‘Why would they not?’

  ‘No reason, but I like to be sure. Now, what’s all this about Hamish?’

  Karen groaned. ‘I can’t do this on an empty stomach. I’m catching the sleeper tonight and I need solid food and a belt of red wine before I get on that train. What about that Neapolitan pizza place round the corner?’

  ‘You’re putting this conversation off.’

  Karen wasn’t willing to admit her friend was right. ‘No, I want a proper run at it, and I’m starving. Let’s finish our drink and get some food.’

  The restaurant was busy, and Karen muttered darkly about not sitting at a shared table. Luckily, a couple were leaving as they arrived and the waiter shoehorned them into the last table in a row of twin-tops. They both knew what they wanted – double mozzarella with spicy salami for Karen, gorgonzola, artichoke and Parma ham for River, a bottle of Primitivo between them.

  As soon as the waiter had taken the order, River leaned forward. ‘So, now I want the whole story. No more, “he’d crossed the line this time”. Chapter and verse, Karen.’

  Second time of telling, Karen’s anger had cooled somewhat. But not her unease at Hamish’s behaviour. ‘It’s the way he assumes he knows what’s best for me. Even if I’ve specifically said something different. When we first got together, I was wary because of the whole earring thing.’ That had been the first crack in Hamish’s facade. Karen had lost an earring down the sink of the holiday let he’d lent her on the case where they’d first met. She’d asked him if he could look for it in the drain. Days later, he’d turned up at her office with the missing earring. She’d been delighted until Anders, his barista, had let slip that Hamish had ordered a replacement pair online.

  ‘Not that again,’ River sighed. ‘He did a generous thing, Karen. He fancied you and he wanted to make an impression. Is that such a bad thing?’

  Karen fiddled with her napkin. ‘Not in itself, no. I get that he saw I was upset about the earrings and he wanted to make it better. But for him it was no big deal to lash out hundreds of pounds on a pair of earrings just to impress a woman he’d barely met.’

  ‘Exactly. No big deal. So why is it such a big deal for you?’

  ‘Because Phil gave me those earrings. And for him it was a big deal. Cops don’t earn a fortune, for him to spend that much on anybody was something considered. Something that carried weight. Not just clicking a button on a website.’

  ‘I thought you’d given Hamish the benefit of the doubt on that? You can’t punish a man for his generosity.’

  ‘Can you not? You and Giorsal, you’re singing from the same hymn sheet on this one. But sometimes there’s a kind of tyranny in generosity. A man is that good to you, you should be grateful. How can you not want to be with him?’ She twisted the stem of her wine glass between her fingers till River gently covered them with her hand.

  ‘You enjoy his company, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You have good sex?’

  ‘We’re good together, no question.’

  ‘And he treats you well?’

  Karen scoffed. ‘Except when he tries to run my life by his rules. Turning up like that at the prison, that showed no respect for me. For my judgement. For my ability to take care of myself. I’m a senior police officer, River. I’m used to taking responsibility for myself.’

  ‘I think you’re reading it wrong. I don’t think it was a lack of respect or a lack of confidence in your ability to handle yourself. I think his motives were a lot closer to Jimmy Hutton’s. He cares about you, Karen. He was there as backstop. In case something completely unpredictable happened. Don’t shoot him down in flames for wanting to help.’

  Whatever mutinous response Karen was about to deliver was cut off by the arrival of the pizzas. Both women exclaimed in delight and treated the waiter to beaming smiles. ‘Ya dancer,’ Karen said. She cut a slice and folded it over, taking a hearty bite. ‘Oh,’ she groaned through a mouthful of pizza. ‘Died, gone to heaven,’ she added when her mouth was empty. ‘What about the other stuff though? Venice, when I wanted Wester Ross? Tasting menus full of ingredients I’ve never even seen before when I’d be delirious with this?’ She waved a hand at the pizza. ‘It’s hard for me to accept all the privilege that goes along with being with Hamish.’

  ‘I get that,’ River said. ‘But did you ever stop to think it’s maybe just as hard for him to adjust to your expectations?’

  18

  Jason had always liked to feel useful. He’d been an obliging child, which had made him his mother’s favourite. The downside was that it had also made him his brother’s patsy. Ronan had dumped Jason with the sticky end of childhood misdemeanours at every opportunity. His unlikely saviour had been football. He’d had an instinct for positional play, a good left foot and a gifted coach. A few talent scouts had taken a look at him when he’d been in his early teens. Then a bad tackle had left him with a complex ankle fracture and all hope of a professional career in the game gone.

  Through it all, his coach had been there for him. And his coach’s day job had been the police. He’d missed out on his dream of playing professional football too, though in his case it had been lack of talent rather than injury that had scuppered him. He’d been heartbroken, just as Jason was. He’d explained that joining the police had been the perfect answer for him. ‘You’ve been dedicated to football, Jason – you’ve never missed a training session, you’ve worked hard and you’ve never let your team down. These are transferable skills. You’d make a good polis and it would make a good man of you.’

  His brother had been outraged. His father had mocked him, saying his mining grandfathers would have disowned him. But his mother had supported him and still told him regularly she was proud of him. Jason had no difficulty meeting the physical criteria, but reading the specimen entrance test papers had filled him with horror. His mother had come to the rescue, taking him through the questions and explaining how to approach them. She’d done it every Sunday afternoon for six weeks and in the end, he’d somehow managed to scrape through.

  While Jason had been a probationer, he’d helped Phil Parhatka on a missing child inquiry. They’d already known each other vaguely from the South Stand at Raith Rovers and he’d worked hard to make an impression. But still, Jason had been surprised when he’d got the call from Phil to join the Historic Cases Unit. And that had been that. He’d slowly di
scovered a dogged persistence that compensated for not being particularly bright. He earned his berth because he ground away at the stuff that drove Karen to distraction. He might not have been as quick to the answers as some, but she could always rely on what he came up with.

  And so instead of spending the evening on his IKEA sofa watching Netflix with Eilidh, Jason had been hunched over his desk in Gayfield Place searching records of births, marriages and deaths. He’d soon confirmed that Amanda had been born thirty-seven years previously in Selkirk in the Borders. Selkirk might as well have been the moon for all Jason knew about it.

  From her birth certificate, he learned that Amanda’s father Barry had been a businessman and her mother Anita had been a housewife. Soon, he knew their dates of birth and where they’d been married. If they were dead, it hadn’t happened in Scotland. Thanks to the security paranoia of Tony Blair’s government, Jason was able to access all sorts of data that had previously been unavailable without a court order, as long as it related to a criminal investigation. And a skeleton in a van in someone’s garage definitely qualified on that count.

  There was no official trace of Barry and Anita McAndrew in the UK after 2015. Google revealed a short item on a local paper website about the sale of their scrap-metal business. Jason grinned at the notion of a scrappie describing himself as a businessman. He’d known scrappies, mostly through Ronan, and that wasn’t the word he’d have used. The newspaper article confirmed what Camilla Gordon-Bruce had told them about buying an olive grove in Greece. That was doubly useful – it lent more weight to the idea that she was a credible witness.

  But it was Facebook that yielded solid gold. Jason tutted. He’d been on Facebook like everybody else until the boss had pointed out a handful of years ago that he was a police officer responsible for catching serious criminals. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be quite so easy to find? He’d deleted his account and when he’d started going out with Eilidh, he’d persuaded her to put in place all the privacy measures she could. ‘Next time you go for a job, do you actually want them to see pictures of you off your face at your cousin’s hen night?’ had been the clincher. She’d grumped about being the only one of her mates with no visible life on the socials, but she’d done as he’d suggested.

  Clearly nobody had given Barry and Nita McAndrew the same advice. There were dozens of photographs of them in their olive grove on a Cretan hillside. As well as the stunning views of the sea, the sunset and the olive trees, Jason was astonished to see videos of mechanical harvesting. He’d expected Greek grannies swathed in black, faces leathery and lined, gap-toothed smiles gurning at the camera, filling ancient baskets with hand-picked fruit. Instead a huge machine drove down regimented lines of trees, appearing to swallow them whole, leaving behind a row of symmetrical squared-off trees and a hopper filled with olives, leaves and bits of twigs. It was as brutal as the giant compressors Barry would have had in his scrapyard.

  Jason put together a memo with the details of his research and sent it to Karen. It would be up to her how to proceed. Somehow, he didn’t think she’d just DM them and ask for a DNA sample. Thankfully, working that one out was beyond his pay grade.

  But he’d only completed half the job. With a sigh, Jason typed ‘Daniella Gilmartin’ into the search box and began the tedious process all over again.

  Across the Firth of Forth in Glenrothes, Daisy Mortimer was also working late. She’d gone home to collect her passport and pack a bag, then returned to the office with a paper-wrapped parcel of white pudding and chips, heavily seasoned with salt and sauce. The intense aroma filled the office, but since everyone else had already left, there was nobody to complain or attempt to steal her chips. She had a few hours to set things up in Paris before she had to catch the sleeper and she was determined to make the most of them.

  A flurry of emails with Verancourt had yielded the name of the officer at the commissariat de police in the Sixth Arrondissement who was to be their liaison. She now knew that murders were investigated by the Brigade Criminelle who divided their squad into teams of seven. Commandant Jean-Claude Gautier was the chef de groupe of the team that had been assigned the suspicious death of the man lying in a mortuary in Fife. According to Verancourt, Daisy and Karen should pitch up at the police headquarters on Rue Bonaparte and ask for Les Gautiers.

  The team is named after the senior officer? she’d queried, wondering whether she’d misunderstood something.

  It is the custom, the answer came back. Daisy decided she’d enjoy telling Karen they should introduce themselves as Les Piries.

  She finished her pudding supper and turned to the internet. She knew the French judicial system was very different, but she needed to find out just how different. The more she read, the more she realised it had at least some common ground with the way things were done in Scotland. In Scotland, the police worked closely with the procurators fiscal, who received case reports from the police then determined the course of investigations into serious crime, as well as deciding which cases should go to court. In France, they had procureurs, who seemed to do roughly the same thing, except that they also worked with a juge d’instruction who was more like an investigator than a judge. It was very confusing; she hoped it didn’t mean the French cops would use the system to shut them out. Somehow, she thought Karen Pirie wouldn’t let that happen.

  At last, she began to compose an email to Commandant Gautier. She read it back, ticking off the points on her fingers. They needed access to the dead man’s apartment and they’d also want to talk to his bandmates and his girlfriend. Had they been informed of his death? Would Les Piries need to be accompanied by Les Gautiers? Could Commandant Gautier smooth the way with the procureur and the juge d’instruction ahead of their arrival, to avoid wasting time?

  Daisy took a deep breath, copied in Verancourt and Karen and pressed send. She’d done her best. She hoped it was good enough for KP Nuts. She checked the time and realised with a shock that she had less than half an hour to get to Kirkcaldy station in time for the sleeper. She jumped up, grabbed her coat and ran for it. If she missed the bloody train, it wouldn’t matter how good a job she’d done. She’d be finished before she’d even started.

  The sleeper pulled out of the station and wound its slow way through the outskirts of Dundee and across the Tay. Karen tugged the worktop from under the sink in her cabin and set her laptop down. She footered about on the internet, checking her email and the news headlines, pretending she was doing something useful. But there was only so long she could postpone what she had to do.

  Hi Hamish

  She stared at the two words. Should it be ‘Dear Hamish’, or was that too distant? On the rare occasions when she’d emailed rather than messaged him, she’d definitely not used anything so formal. Maybe just his name, without any salutation? Or did that sound too challenging?

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ she muttered in exasperation. ‘Get over yourself and get on with it.’

  Hi Hamish.

  I don’t enjoy being at odds with you. I really value the time we spend together. You make me laugh, you challenge me to look at things differently. I think we’re good together in lots of ways and I don’t want that to come to an end.

  That took ten minutes and a lot of hammering of the ‘delete’ key. Karen opened her bag and rummaged for the can of gin and tonic she’d bought earlier. She took a hearty swig, winced at its sweetness and frowned at the screen again.

  But even though we’ve got a lot in common, there’s a lot of differences between us. We grew up with very different expectations. I find it hard to adjust to your sense of privilege and I know you think I’m sometimes chippy. I realise you think you’re being kind and generous and protective, but to me, that sometimes feels like you want to change me into somebody I’m not. We think of control as being about telling somebody what to do and what not to do, but kindness can be just as controlling.

  I mean it when
I say I don’t want this to end. But you’ve got to stop deciding what’s best for me. When you turned up the other morning, I was outraged. What I was doing was none of your business. Even though it wasn’t an official police operation, the last thing I needed was to be distracted by a civilian.

  This is me, the way I am. Thrawn. But also gallus. Do you even know what those words mean, growing up in America like you did? Look them up, Hamish. You’re not going to change me, and if you’re determined to keep trying, we’ve got no future. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh but there’s no point in pretending I’m going to turn into somebody different.

  I suspect you’re sometimes anxious that you can’t stand comparison with a dead man, but in my head, it’s not a competition between you and Phil. The person I’m in a relationship with is you. I see you, not Phil. I don’t want to lose what we have.

  I’m on a train to Paris right now. I’ll be away for a few days. I’m on a case. I do want to talk to you (if you still want to talk to me) but I need to focus on what I’m doing, so can we leave it till I get back? Probably just as well if we both have a wee bit of time to work out what we want. I’ll let you know when I’m back.

  Take care of yourself. Kx

  Karen stared at the ‘x’. She picked up her can and went to take a swig. To her surprise, it was empty. She had no recollection of drinking it in the pauses between sentences. She read her words again and couldn’t see a way of improving their stark message. Shaking her head, Karen pressed send.

  She had a difficult few days ahead. Getting one complication out of the way was a step in the right direction. She contemplated walking down to the restaurant car and buying more drink, but she knew that wouldn’t make anything better. Solving a murder, though? That beat a gin and tonic hands down, every time.

  19

  Wednesday, 19 February 2020

  Karen stared at Daisy across the café table in St Pancras station. ‘You’re kidding me? Les Piries?’ She swallowed a mouthful of coffee as if it would return her to the land of sensible.