Still Life

by Val McDermid

  Chevrolet scoffed. ‘You think this was the apartment of an art connoisseur? You didn’t think it was out of place among the saxophones and the pages of music?’

  ‘He might not have been interested in art, but his sister-in-law collects paintings,’ Daisy said. There was a defiant set to her jaw that Karen liked the look of. ‘I thought he might be inquiring on her behalf.’

  Chevrolet grunted. ‘So now we will go back and you will find this letter and hand it over.’

  ‘Hand it over?’ Karen bristled.

  ‘It’s evidence. Found on French soil, so here it stays.’

  Karen recognised stubbornness when she saw it. She saw it often enough in her own mirror, after all. ‘We’ll want to photograph it. And video you taking it into custody.’

  He rolled his eyes.

  ‘It’s the law in Scotland. Evidence has to be corroborated. It’s not enough for me to wave a photo on my phone and say, “Look, here’s the proof.” So I need to film you identifying yourself and showing the letter, in the apartment where it was found.’

  ‘This is a crazy law. How do you ever convict murderers and rapists? These are not crimes with witnesses.’

  ‘We manage,’ Karen said with a note of finality. Badly, her head said. She’d seen too many sexual offenders walk smirking from court after a judge had explained the law to a jury. And those were the tiny percentage who made it as far as the dock. Successive Lord Advocates had tinkered with the law to try to make it work better for the victims but Karen still burned with rage when colleagues passed on stories of yet more failed complaints.

  ‘OK, we will go to the apartment,’ Chevrolet sighed. ‘Did you book flights back to Scotland?’

  ‘No, we’ll catch the Eurostar. I’ve business in London.’ Daisy gave her a first-I’ve-heard-about-it look.

  ‘I hope you are not keeping something from me,’ Chevrolet grumbled in a low voice.

  ‘It’s to do with another matter. We don’t have the luxury of working one case at a time.’ Karen sounded relaxed. Phil had always said that was her tell for lies.

  They barely made the 17:13 Eurostar back to London, and only because Chevrolet was so keen to see the back of them that he hustled them through the boarding formalities, speeding them through customs and immigration and on to the train. ‘I will keep you informed of any developments here in Paris,’ he said with complete lack of sincerity.

  ‘Of course you will,’ Karen said. ‘And I will do likewise.’ She smiled. ‘We may be able to help each other. You never know.’

  They had a pair of seats by themselves, the high backs giving them a degree of privacy. No sooner had they settled in than Daisy said, ‘What was all that about? Business in London on another case?’

  Karen shrugged. ‘He pissed me off with his territoriality. He knows nothing about this case or the background, he showed zero interest in finding out about it. So I’m not about to tell him the whole story of what I’m up to.’

  ‘What are you up to? Am I allowed to ask?’

  ’Always. Though I may not always tell you. But this time, I will. I sent a wee message when we were on the way back from Caen. We’re meeting up this evening with DCS Ron Beckett. Back in the day, he was the SIO on the Iain Auld disappearance. I spoke to him when I did the cold case review.’

  ‘How come you did the review? I mean, it was a Met case, right? Not a Scottish one.’

  ‘Not directly, no. Though Lothian Police, as it was then, dealt with the interviews north of the border: Mary Auld, and the Scotland Office team in Edinburgh. And although it’s technically not a Scottish case, our political masters have never been convinced that it was taken seriously enough at the time. If you remember, it was the early days of the ­coalition government and Iain Auld wasn’t high on the agenda of the Home Office, who mostly just wanted Scotland to go away and not be annoying.’

  Daisy chuckled. ‘That went well, eh?’

  ‘Not in the long run, but it was too late for Iain Auld by then.’

  ‘So the cold case review? That was political?’

  Karen grinned. ‘You might say that. I couldn’t possibly comment. Though I have to admit that, having done the review, I didn’t see any indication that there was a political dimension to Iain Auld’s disappearance. Unless he was in possession of a secret so deeply buried that it’s stayed that way.’

  ‘And that doesn’t happen often in politics, right?’

  ‘Things have a way of swimming up into the light. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve clawed your way up the ladder, the bodies never stay buried forever.’

  ‘So you think DCS Beckett knows more than he’s let on so far?’

  ‘I doubt it. But on the off-chance, now that we’ve got something to trade . . . Well, since we’re passing through, I thought it wouldn’t hurt.’

  There was, Daisy thought, some kind of fundamental affinity between cops and curry houses. Detective Chief Superintendent Ron Beckett had directed them to one of several on a side street near Euston station that was as fragrant as some of the Goan bazaars where she’d eaten on the trip she’d made to India with three friends in the summer before their final year.

  Beckett was a big man, broad in the shoulder and the face, running to fat around his midriff, an issue that was disguised by decent tailoring till he unbuttoned his jacket and sat down. His silver hair was still thick, brushed back from a forehead tramlined by years of frowns. He had a short squat nose above a thin-lipped mouth, but it was his eyes that she would remember. They were a warm liquid brown, the kind of eyes that offered reassurance and understanding. Daisy would have bet they’d lulled more than a few people into revealing far more than they’d intended in the interview room. ‘Never underestimate the attraction of the confessional,’ one of her law tutors had once said to her. ‘It kept the Catholic Church in power for hundreds of years.’

  ‘Good to see you again,’ Karen greeted him.

  ‘You nipped in right on time, Karen. Another couple of weeks and you’d have got the, “Alice doesn’t live here any more” response.’

  ‘How come?’ She sounded startled.

  ‘I’m offski,’ he said. ‘I’ve got thirty-five years in, it’s time to kick back and enjoy my pension. We’re selling up and moving lock, stock and two smoking barrels across to Galway. I plan to spend my days fishing and my evenings drinking Guinness.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Karen grinned. ‘I bet your team are sick with jealousy.’

  ‘I like to think so. And this must be Daisy Mortimer.’ He extended a large hand with surprisingly slender fingers and grasped hers firmly. Just enough to establish confident authority without going for macho dominance. ‘Hello, Daisy. I’ve been speaking to your other boss,’ he said.

  ‘Charlie Todd’s been in touch?’ Karen opened the menu. Daisy thought she was aiming for nonchalance and hitting the bullseye.

  ‘Courtesy call to let me know I could close the file on James Auld,’ he said drily.

  ‘That’s one way of looking it. Not the way we do it in the Historic Cases Unit, though. Even if the prime suspect is dead, the file’s still live till we can prove who did it.’ Karen spoke mildly but Daisy knew her well enough by now to know this was an article of faith.

  ‘Can’t disagree with you, Karen. But let’s get some drinks in. Celebrate the last hurrah of a dying breed. Yours is a different world from the one I joined up in, Daisy. We’re drowning in admin and reports these days. Not enough boots on the ground.’ He signalled to the waiter. ‘What’s it going to be, ladies?’

  Beers and an abundance of food ordered, they settled down to discuss what had brought them there. ‘Sounds like Charlie Todd’s team are struggling with this one. They haven’t managed to track down where your man was staying, so they haven’t got his laptop or any notes or letters.’ He scoffed. ‘You’d think it wouldn’t be rocket science. How many place
s could he be? It’s not like Torremolinos, is it?’

  ‘It’s a tourist area, Ron. There’s plenty of holiday lets. A lot of them, you have to take a place for a whole week. If that’s what Auld did, nobody’s going to realise he’s not there any more until the turnaround day.’

  ‘Yeah, but surely they can phone round and see whether anybody’s rented to a Paul Allard or a James Auld?’

  ‘With the rise of short-term lets like Airbnb, there’s a lot of places for rent that don’t show up on the tourist board or local authority lists,’ Daisy said. ‘People rent out everything from second homes to static caravans. It’s not straightforward, sir.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he grumbled. The poppadums arrived and he attacked them. ‘So, how was Paris, Karen? You get anything out of it apart from some decent grub?’

  ‘A few loose ends, though it’s hard to say if it means anything. Auld made two trips before he went off to Scotland: London and Dublin. But without his laptop and his phone, which is presumably at the bottom of the Firth of Forth, we don’t have much to go on.’ Pakoras arrived and generated a diversion from conversation.

  ‘These are good,’ Karen said at last. ‘Really good.’

  ‘This is top,’ Beckett agreed. ‘So you’ve got no clue what was going on?’

  ‘All we’ve got is a letter from an art dealer in Dublin. Auld had apparently been inquiring about an artist, but there’s no name in the letter.’

  If Beckett had been a dog, his ears would have pricked up. ‘That’s funny.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t see how it can be connected, but about four, five years after Iain Auld went missing and James Auld did one, I got dragged into another case involving Dover House. You know, the Scotland Office? It wasn’t strictly speaking my beat. But I’d already built bridges with the civil servants, and it was a sensitive matter. And in spite of that they thought it’d be better to let me loose on it.’ He grinned.

  ‘That sounds intriguing,’ Karen said.

  ‘It was. But the only thing it had in common with Iain Auld’s disappearance was that we never resolved it.’

  Before Karen could respond, the curries arrived, fragrant and unctuous in their various sauces. There was another pause while they loaded their plates and tore off chunks of naan and paratha. Then she said, ‘So what’s the story?’

  Beckett swallowed a mouthful of saag paneer and washed it down with a mouthful of Kingfisher. He clearly relished the art of storytelling. ‘So, you’ve got all these ministers and senior officials in Whitehall. They’ve all got offices. That’s a lot of wall space to cover, a lot of opportunities to impress the people who come to visit. The way it works is the minister gets to choose what hangs on the walls. He or she gets the pick of the national collections. Theoretically, the junior ministers and the civil servants get to choose, but in reality, you’d be mad to disagree with the boss.’

  ‘OK. I get the picture.’

  Daisy and Beckett groaned. ‘I see what you did there,’ Beckett said, pointing with his fork at Karen. ‘So, in 2015, a Tory majority government takes over from that dog’s breakfast of a coalition. And straight away, the new Scottish Secretary of State decides to flex his muscles and replace all the art with paintings that suit his Tory taste. The existing ones get sent back to the Scottish galleries they came from. But one sharp-eyed conservator noticed something wasn’t quite right with one of the paintings. Apparently the original had had some damage repaired and there was no sign of it now.’ He paused for effect and to shovel some lamb pasanda into his mouth.

  Karen spooned black dhal onto her plate. ‘I’m betting they put the rest of them under the microscope.’

  ‘Spot on, Sherlock. And guess what? Six of them turned out to be fakes. Very good fakes, according to the geeks that know about these things, but as genuine as a nine-bob note.’ His eyes slid towards the ceiling as he recalled the artists whose work had been counterfeited. ‘Raeburn, MacTaggart, Redpath, Eardley, Crawhall, Doig.’ He grinned again. ‘I bet you never thought I had that much culture in me, Karen.’

  ‘How come this wasn’t all over the papers?’ Karen demanded. ‘Why is this the first I’m hearing about it?’

  ‘Well, it was a huge embarrassment. The government borrows some art from the national collection and somehow some faker gets not just one over on them but six. How stupid do you think that makes them look?’

  ‘But surely it would have been the previous government who would have had to take responsibility?’ Daisy looked puzzled. ‘I’d have thought they’d have been delighted to pass the buck to their political rivals.’

  Beckett’s brown eyes looked sorrowful. ‘You’re so young, Daisy.’ He shook his head.

  Karen took pity. She’d been made to feel like the idiot in the room often enough to be merciful. ‘The previous government was the coalition between the Tories and the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems held the Scottish Secretary post, but the Tories were the senior partners in the coalition. Disgracing the Lib Dems would have reflected badly on them. Plus it would have been politically dangerous – the Lib Dems knew where the bodies were buried.’

  ‘Correct,’ Beckett said. ‘So they kept the lid on it.’

  ‘But you investigated?’

  ‘Of course I did, Karen. But it wasn’t that simple. The Lib Dem Scottish Secretaries mostly kept the same artwork on the walls that they’d inherited from the outgoing Labour government. They liked them. And they kind of wanted to maintain a distinction between the paintings that would appeal to a Tory minister and what they appreciated. So we had six paintings that had been in place for varying lengths of time from seven to fourteen years. Those copies could have been made any time.’

  ‘What about forensics?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Didn’t get us anywhere. Bloody Dover House. Where police careers go to die.’ He speared a lump of lamb and chewed gloomily.

  ‘You’ve hardly ended up on the scrapheap,’ Karen pointed out mildly.

  ‘Oh, I know. I’m not complaining. It’s annoying, that’s all. I hate unfinished business.’ He drained his glass and waved it at the waiter. ‘But then, I guess you’re used to picking up other people’s unfinished business, right, Karen?’

  ‘Right, Ron. And every now and again, we get to finish it.’

  ‘Well, I hope you have better luck with James Auld than I did with his brother. I mean, it was sheer luck that his body got picked up when it did. From what I understand from Charlie Todd, if the body hadn’t got tangled up with a lobster pot, it might have ended up a pile of bones on a Norwegian beach. If I was a betting man, I’d put money on something like that happening to his brother.’

  Karen tore off another wad of naan. ‘You’re probably right, Ron. If you couldn’t find out what happened to Iain Auld, I don’t have a cat in hell’s chance.’

  Daisy focused on the food on her plate, making sure Ron Beckett couldn’t see her face. She didn’t want to give away the fact that she already recognised when Karen was lying.

  27

  Karen and Daisy paced platform 15 of Euston station, waiting to see whether there would be any fairy godparents in the shape of no-shows for the sleeper, rendering their berths magically available. Not even their warrant cards and Daisy’s charm offensive could spirit up a pair of empty cabins. ‘If this was the bloody Orient Express, they’d have a spare in case of homicidal emergencies,’ Karen had muttered, shoving her hands deeper into her pockets against the cold.

  ‘Aye, but then neither of us is Hercule Poirot,’ Daisy pointed out.

  ‘Just as well, that moustache would be a bugger with a plate of Scotch broth.’

  They both giggled at the vision of Poirot’s moustache liberally decorated with bits of barley and carrot. ‘That was a great curry,’ Daisy said. ‘Shame “call-me-Ron” wasn’t more useful.’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting anything, to be honest. But I though
t it would be worth keeping the channels open. Turns out, with him on the verge of retirement, it was probably a waste of time. But there’s one important lesson for you there, Daisy. That story about the fake paintings – that only goes to show that anything short of murder can be brushed under the carpet if the politicians want to avoid embarrassment badly enough.’

  They reached the far end of the platform, only yards beyond the improbably long snake of carriages that formed the Glasgow and Edinburgh sleepers. ‘So what do you think happened to the fake paintings?’ Daisy asked as they turned their backs on the red signal lights and walked back into the bleak concrete shell of the station. ‘Have they been quietly removed from the galleries’ inventories? Or are the fakes tucked away in storage with a note never to display them publicly again?’

  Karen shrugged. ‘No idea. I know one or two of the conservators at the National Galleries’ storage facility down in Granton from a case we were looking at a while back, but this is the first I heard of this. Not even a whisper or a hint. But it’s not our problem, thank goodness.’ Before Daisy could respond, Karen noticed one of the train crew waving to them. ‘Come on, looks like we might have got lucky.’

  They jogged back down the platform to where a steward stood clutching a clipboard. Wrapped in a thick coat and muffled in a scarf, she looked like a small animal peering out of a nest. ‘Good news and bad news,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a cabin free but it’s on the Glasgow section of the train. It’s five minutes to departure, I don’t think we’ll get anything else now.’

  ‘Is that a single?’ Karen asked.

  ‘It’s set up as a single—’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ she said quickly, anticipating the unwanted offer to prepare an upper bunk. She liked Daisy, but not enough to want to share a tiny cabin with her. ‘Presumably you’ve got seats available on the Edinburgh train?’

  The steward got it. ‘That’s right.’ She smiled at Daisy. ‘If you head down towards the rear of the train, one of my colleagues will sort you out.’