Still Life

by Val McDermid

  She breathed in deeply, and not just from the climb. She caught the staleness of air undisturbed for days, the faint smell of cooked food, and a hint of lavender which she traced immediately to a bunch of dried flowers stuffed haphazardly into a vase on a table by the door. So far, she’d only known James Auld as a corpse. Now she had a chance to discover the living man.

  22

  Hand-delivering the DNA swab from Tam Gilmartin might just move things along more quickly. It was, Jason thought, worth a try. He could give them his best hangdog, put-upon look and maybe one of the remaining technicians would take pity on him. Especially if they’d had an encounter with Karen in the past.

  In the event, he didn’t get near a human being. There was a sign sellotaped to the door of the DNA lab: samples through the slot please. He tried ringing the bell but there was no response.

  Despondent, he was about to leave when he remembered that Tamsin had Susan Leitch’s laptop. He wondered whether she was making any headway with it. He found her at her desk, an open packet of Jaffa Cakes by her left hand. She glanced over her shoulder and stuffed them into her desk drawer. ‘Don’t tell,’ she said. ‘It’s against the law to have biscuits next to keyboards.’

  ‘But are they biscuits?’

  Tamsin swung round on her chair and grinned. ‘The perennial question. The VAT tribunal decision of 1991 was supposed to settle that. Cakes, they said. But Jase, can you in your heart of hearts agree with them?’

  He wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Tamsin terrified him. He never knew when she was serious and when she was joking. The fact that her hair made a different statement every time he saw her only made it worse. Today the top of her head was dyed blue and white, the saltire of the Scottish flag. Was it ironic? Or a post-Brexit slap-down? ‘I don’t actually like them,’ he said.

  ‘So why are you here, if not to steal my biscuits?’

  ‘I was passing and I wondered if you’d found anything interesting on Susan Leitch’s laptop?’

  ‘Depends on what you find interesting. There’s some cool cycle routes in Perthshire and Grampian. And some recipes for taco fillings that had my mouth watering.’ His face fell and she took pity on him. ‘Karen said you were looking for emails between Susan and Amanda McAndrew.’

  ‘That’s right. Have you found anything?’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You know how you found a skeleton in the VW camper? And that told you there had been an entire body there? Well, I’ve found the skeletal traces of a whole wedge of emails between the pair of them. But somebody has deleted them at some point. So what we have left is fragments scattered round the hard drive like confetti.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Jase. Putting that together is like doing a jigsaw when the dog’s eaten half the sky. It’d be beyond most techies.’ She turned back to the screen. ‘But I am not most techies. I am a fucking genius. I’ve got a long way to go with this but I can tell you, for example, that Susan sent an email to Amanda somewhere around five years ago that contained the fragment, “toilet rolls and balsamic vinegar”. Which I’m guessing is one of those, “Can you pick up on the way home?” messages, not some coded message about obscure sexual practices. Though I could be wrong. There’s no telling with Scottish lesbians.’

  Jason hated that he could feel a scarlet flush creeping up his neck. ‘Any idea how long it’ll take?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ Tamsin was serious now. ‘I’ve got a program running in the background. Could be tomorrow, could be six weeks, could be never. Depends how good a housekeeper Susan was when it came to her computer. On the plus side, most people are completely rubbish at it. If they let their houses get in the state they leave their hard drives in, you wouldn’t visit without a hazmat suit.’

  ‘OK. Thanks. Sorry to bother you.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember not to tell Karen,’ she said absently, already lost in her screen.

  It had never occurred to him that she would. Now he had one more thing to worry about.

  On the other side of the Channel, Daisy wasn’t faring much better. James Auld’s fellow jazzmen were clearly distressed at the news of his death. They all protested that they’d do whatever they could to help catch whoever had done this to him. But none of them could shed any light on who that might have been. Two of them had been friends with him since they’d served in the Foreign Legion together. Yes, sometimes Paul had argued with other men, but it had come to nothing. ‘He was an easy kind of guy,’ the drummer said. ‘Some guys in the Legion, they’re always looking for a fight. He wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Don’t get the wrong idea, he wasn’t a coward,’ the bass player chipped in. ‘He’d stand up for himself. But he was good at taking the sting out of a row, you know?’

  ‘No enemies that you can think of?’ Daisy was almost pleading. They looked at each other and shook their heads. She thought they were genuinely stumped. ‘What about his love life? Did he upset anyone? Steal someone’s girlfriend? Have an affair with somebody’s wife?’

  The drummer laughed. ‘He was like all of us when he was in the Legion. Like a monk except when he wasn’t. We all used hookers when there was no choice. And we all had one-night-stands and meaningless interludes from time to time.’

  ‘But he wasn’t in the Legion any more,’ Daisy pointed out.

  The keyboard player gave her a shrewd look. ‘He has a lover. But not here in Paris.’

  The drummer again. ‘Pascale Vargas. She’s quite a catch. She owns a jazz club in Caen. A nice little earner. And she’s a good-looking woman. Her and Paul, they hit it off from the first time we played there.’ He scoffed. ‘Fucking sax. It’s like catnip to women. Should be called a sexophone.’ Suddenly he looked alarmed. ‘Not that I care about Pascale, don’t get me wrong, I have my own woman.’

  ‘Paul didn’t cut anybody out,’ the keyboard man insisted. ‘Pascale was single when they got together.’

  This was going nowhere, Daisy thought. The only thing she was getting out of it was an extensive revision session in colloquial French. ‘Did he ever talk about his life before the Legion?’

  The drummer laughed. ‘There are two kinds of men in the Legion. The ones who never stop talking about how hard their lives were before they joined, and the ones who never start. I don’t know anything about Paul’s reasons for signing up. All I know is that he was Scottish and when he arrived he had a dog of an accent and not a curse word to his name. He soon fixed both of those.’

  The keyboard player leaned forward earnestly. ‘We really want to help. We loved the guy. But we didn’t talk about why somebody might want to kill us. We talked about music and football and movies and whether we were going to drive or take the train to next week’s gigs.’ He spread his hands in a shrug. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Did he say anything about what he was going to do back in Scotland? Who he was going to see?’

  The bass player frowned. ‘I asked him if he still had family back there. He didn’t answer. He just said he was hoping to see somebody he hadn’t seen for years.’

  Daisy’s instincts sprang to attention. ‘He didn’t say who?’

  ‘I didn’t ask. It was none of my business, after all. If he wanted me to know, he would have told me.’ He gave her a crooked smile. ‘I think men and women are very different when it comes to sharing their lives. Maybe you should go to Caen and talk to Pascale. If he said more to anyone, I would think it would be her, no?’

  Daisy bloody hoped so. It was a long way to come to find themselves stuck in a cul-de-sac.

  23

  No one had ever accused Karen of being tidy, but even she would have been driven mad by James Auld’s flat. Every surface in his living room was covered with teetering piles of books, sheet music and music magazines, a pile of concert ticket stubs. The only except
ion was a laptop-sized space on a small table in one corner. The shelves were crammed with CDs and vinyl. Three gleaming saxophones stood in a line on stands. Glasses that had once obviously held red wine perched in random spots. Either Auld had been rebelling against all those years of a spartan military regime or else it had simply failed to knock his natural hoarding tendency out of him.

  Where there was wall space between the shelves, there were framed photographs. Auld in action with his quintet. Auld in his Foreign Legion uniform, smiling knowingly from underneath the peak of his kepi. Other jazz musicians she didn’t recognise. And by the window, with its view of roof terraces and tiles, a photograph of the Auld brothers in their twenties, arms slung round each other’s shoulders, grinning at the camera. Beneath it, a wedding photograph. Karen peered at it. Iain and James Auld were groom and best man; the smiling bride, a younger version of the Mary Auld she’d interviewed during the case review. No sign there of the sort of animosity that led to murder. Not that there was any significance in that. Too often she’d seen what happened when love twisted and turned into shapes of rage.

  The kitchen that led off the living room was tiny. It looked as if James Auld had done little more than make coffee and store bottles of red wine here. Who could blame him? There were cafés and bars on every street corner. There was no need for a man to cook for himself if he lacked the inclination. She opened the fridge. Two bags of coffee beans; a Tupperware box containing three half-consumed cheeses she couldn’t name; a half-empty jar of artichokes in olive oil. Five bottles of beer.

  She moved back to the cramped hallway. Between the coats hanging on the wall and the young gendarme, there was barely room to turn around. She gestured to him to move aside so she could go through the pockets. Three pairs of gloves, some crumpled receipts for a few euros, two tubes of lip salve. Karen sighed and stuck her head into the bathroom. It looked clean and surprisingly neat. Toiletries sat on a long shelf, towels hung folded on a rail on the door of the shower.

  The final door led from the hall into a bedroom. Karen had expected the same chaos as the living room but she was surprised to find the same neatness as the bathroom. The duvet had been shaken out over the double bed, the pillows plumped up. One end of the room was curtained off, acting as a wardrobe. Jackets, shirts and trousers in shades of black and dark blue hung neatly and a small chest of drawers contained a couple of sweaters, underwear and T-shirts. Five pairs of shoes sat in a line along the bottom. He didn’t have many clothes; it looked as if he spent his money on music. On the wall opposite the bed was a long mirror and next to it, a small framed oil seascape. She took a quick photograph with her phone. Presumably this was the one he’d chosen from his brother’s possessions but she’d better check at some point with Mary Auld. Just to dot the I’s and cross the T’s. And find out where it was, in case it might have some relevance. Though what that might be, she had no idea.

  A chair sat tucked beneath the dormer window, a light sweater thrown over the back. The only other furniture in the room was a bedside table. A fat paperback sat under a goose-necked lamp. Karen picked it up. Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice by Tad Hershon. She’d never heard of either of them, but that wasn’t surprising. Once you got past Ella Fitzgerald, it was like a foreign language to her. Idly she opened the drawer, expecting nothing, merely putting off her return to the chaos of the living room.

  A buff-coloured cardboard document wallet lay underneath a pair of earphones. Karen stretched out a gloved hand and eased it out. She opened the flap and took out the contents. At first glance, they made little sense. A photograph, a newspaper article printed off the internet, a cryptic scribble on the back of it, an article about art prices and an old hardback of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, complete with a pretty battered dust jacket.

  She sat down on the bed and studied them more closely. The photograph showed two men from mid-torso upwards. They were in a close embrace, arms around each other, nose to nose, eyes locked, smiles mirroring each other. And they were naked. There was no mistaking the nature of the moment. Lovers, caught in the act of affection.

  One of them was Iain Auld. There was no mistaking that either. She turned it over. In faint pencil, she read, This between the endpaper and the back board of OHMSS. Now I know who the man was.

  ‘That’s more than I do,’ Karen muttered under her breath. She picked up the book and opened it at the back. She could see the endpaper had been carefully separated from the board. She guessed it had been done with a scalpel, or something similar. She could see the faint outline of the photograph on the endpaper, around ten by fifteen centimetres. That must have been what alerted James Auld to its presence.

  So it appeared Iain Auld had a secret male lover. That hardly made him unique in the ranks of British civil servants. But seriously, she thought, how could it have anything to do with his disappearance? It might have been embarrassing but it wasn’t criminal, unless the other man was a Russian spy. Even then, what would a foreign power want with an insider’s view of the Scotland Office?

  She put the book down and picked up the printout. It was a four-year-old news story from the Guardian about a fire destroying an art gallery in Brighton. The article said it had housed the best and most extensive collection of contem­porary British art outside London. Art worth tens of millions of pounds had gone up in smoke and police suspected arson. The words were accompanied by photographs of the blaze, flames shooting into the night, splashing the sea with scarlet and gold. A third picture showed a crowd of spectators, as excited as children on bonfire night. There was a headshot of billionaire industrialist Simon Goldman, whose collection had formed the core of the museum’s contents. He was an elderly man who bore no resemblance to the stranger in the photo. Karen had absolutely no idea what it all meant. As far as she knew, neither Iain nor James Auld had any connection to Brighton. Maybe that was where the mystery man lived. Maybe he’d worked in the gallery? And where exactly would that take her, if it were the case?

  ‘Bloody nowhere,’ she muttered. She turned over the cutting. In the same neat hand as the writing on the photo­graph, she read:

  12 NT

  Ouds

  Hilary 92/3

  Karen rolled her eyes. ‘12 NT’ looked like one of those obscure notations you got in newspaper descriptions of bridge games. She’d never played anything more complicated than whist, so she had no idea whether it was anything to do with cards. She googled ‘Oud’ and discovered it was a thirteen-stringed instrument like a lute that hailed from the Middle East. For all she knew, it was a mainstay of Lebanese jazz. And who was Hilary? It could be a man or a woman, a first name or a surname. Back in 1992, Iain Auld must have been in his very early twenties, James a couple of years older. Was this someone Iain knew from university? He’d done his first degree at Edinburgh, then a masters at Oxford. She didn’t remember the name Hilary cropping up in the files she’d pored over two years before.

  What the hell was going on? She was a good detective, she knew that. But she wasn’t Sherlock Bloody Holmes. Cryptic clues and the French Foreign Legion? This was the kind of bollocks she and Phil used to rip the piss out of, curled up on the sofa with Sunday-night television. Standing in a Paris atelier trying to make sense of some sub-Agatha Christie nonsense? That wasn’t proper coppering, not the way she understood it.

  She put everything back in the folder and stuck it in her backpack. She had no compunction about keeping it to herself. If it meant nothing to her, it would mean even less to Commandant Gautier. But in spite of her inability to make sense of the contents of the document wallet, she felt certain it was connected to what had brought James Auld back to Scotland, and to his death.

  That would have to wait. For now, she couldn’t ignore that anarchic disarray in the living room.

  Karen had barely finished the first pile next to the sofa when Daisy turned up with Chevrolet in tow. He whistled softly when he
took in the task before them. ‘My wife would kill me if I tried to live like this,’ he said.

  ‘But our guy didn’t have a wife,’ Karen pointed out. ‘He lived the way he wanted. He was untidy, not dirty. The kitchen’s clean, the bedroom’s like a monk’s cell.’ She turned to Daisy. ‘How did you get on with the band?’

  Daisy pulled a face. ‘Waste of time. Considering how much time these guys spend together, they know amazingly little about each other’s lives. It just confirms all the clichés about men being from Mars and women being from Venus. If I’d spent this long with any of my female friends I’d know every detail of their day-to-day, as well as their entire emotional history and their relationships with their parents and siblings.’

  Chevrolet shrugged. ‘Different priorities. I can tell you who won Ligue 1 every year this century. Ladies, feel free to engage with the life of Paul Allard. I will leave you with my colleague for now. Perhaps we can meet for breakfast? Where are you staying?’

  Karen looked at Daisy. ‘Where did you book us in?’

  Daisy flushed. ‘You didn’t tell me to book a hotel.’

  ‘So where did you think we were going to sleep? Under a bridge? When I told you to sort out the travel, I assumed you’d have realised we needed somewhere to stay.’ Karen shook her head, cross. ‘Even Jason can manage that.’

  Chevrolet was clearly enjoying the moment. He had a tiny smirk that Karen had a powerful urge to rearrange. ‘Maybe something we men do better. Don’t worry, Commandant Pirie. There are some hotels in the next street, we use them when we have to make arrangements for visitors. I will go now and find you accommodation.’ He gave a small bow from the waist. ‘I shall return.’

  Karen waited till she heard the front door close. ‘He’s a very annoying man.’