Still Life

by Val McDermid

  How must it feel, Karen wondered, to work in a job where what you achieved was worth more when you were dead? Phil Parhatka had been one of the most committed cops she’d ever served with. The work he’d done, particularly in his last post with the Murder Prevention Unit, had transformed lives and prospects. But who even remembered his name, apart from her, his family and a few close friends? Ten years on from his death, would she still be grieving? Would she still be turning over the pages of memory, seeing even more value in the things he’d done? Would the women and kids whose lives he’d saved even remember his name? And yet David Greig, a man who’d never saved a life, was revered and referred to in dozens of reference books and articles. Where was the justice in that?

  For a moment, she buried her head in her hands. Thinking this way was the quickest route to guilt over the man asleep in her bed and that wasn’t fair to Hamish. Or to her own future. Karen growled deep in her throat and sat up straight. She had the basic facts lined up. Now it was time for whatever spin the media had put on Greig’s death.

  She went for the trashiest tabloid first. BRIT ART BAD BOY IN CLIFF PLUNGE screamed the headline.

  Multi-millionaire artist David Greig has thrown himself off a cliff to his death, police believe.

  Notorious for his drug-fuelled partying, gay David, 41, left a heartbroken suicide note on top of the sheer cliffs in Anglesey, North Wales, it is claimed.

  A friend said, ‘He had a bad break-up and he’d lost his mojo. Without his art and his lover, he just couldn’t go on.’

  Karen would have bet her flat on the fictitious nature of the ‘friend’. She skimmed the rest of it and gleaned the information that Greig’s car had been found unlocked in the nearby South Stack lighthouse car park and that Anglesey had been the scene of childhood holidays.

  One of the red-tops had dredged up an ex. Among the scurrilous tales of drug-taking and sexual misbehaviour was an admission that Greig had calmed down in the past few years after a health scare. ‘“He more or less stopped partying hard,”’ she read. ‘“I know he was seeing someone, but he’d started to keep his personal life very private. Then a couple of months ago, the news all over town was that he’d been dumped and he was completely devastated.”’

  Karen frowned. The timing was interesting. If the ex-boyfriend’s timeline was right, Greig had been left broken-hearted at least a fortnight before Iain Auld had disappeared. If Auld had been his secret lover, a distraught Greig moved neatly into the prime suspect slot. A spurned lover driven wild by grief and rage was a much better fit. And it made sense of Greig’s suicide. Overcome by remorse, he’d gone back to a place where he’d been happy and taken his own life. Textbook, she thought.

  And yet. And yet . . . In her experience, textbook was usually an excuse for lazy investigation. Settling for the obvious without probing for the hidden truths. In the back of her head, she could hear Phil’s voice. ‘Where’s the evidence, Karen? A single photograph. That’s all you’ve got. How does Oxford University fit into this? You don’t even know whether OUDS performed Twelfth Night in 1992 or 1993. And what has any of that got to do with an art gallery fire twenty-five years later?’ They’d often tested their evidence like that. Challenged each other, unpicked the assumptions and stripped them back to the bare facts.

  If this convenient explanation of what had happened to Iain Auld was true, it had a profound effect on the investigation of his brother’s murder. It meant that this second death was completely unconnected to what had happened to Iain. By rights, she should concentrate on trying to find some evidence that would prove her hypothesis and hand the current case back to Charlie Todd. Tell the Dog Biscuit it had nothing to do with politics, that everybody in the Scottish establishment could breathe a sigh of relief. That was the obvious course of action.

  But for some reason, she didn’t want to let go yet. ‘You’re so bloody possessive,’ she muttered. Because she’d already done the legwork, part of her felt she was entitled to follow the thread through the labyrinth. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to pursue the Edinburgh College of Art connection, though she had no idea how to find someone who had taught Greig thirty years before.

  Karen stretched and yawned. The clock on the computer said 6:43. Time always slipped away once she started chasing down the rabbit holes of the internet. She was about to open her email when she heard the door open. She swung round to see Hamish in the doorway, tousled and yawning. She wasn’t surprised; his dual lives running a croft and a chain of coffee shops had made him an early riser. ‘I didn’t hear you get up,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘Are you working? Shall I make coffee?’

  ‘You know me so well. Let me check my email and I’ll be right with you.’ Karen turned back to the screen, the familiar grumbling and hissing of the coffee machine an accompaniment to a slew of routine messages.

  ‘We could go down to the Malmaison for an early breakfast,’ Hamish said, handing her the fresh brew.

  ‘I’ve got too much to get through today.’ She softened the rejection by putting down the coffee and kissing him. ‘It’s your own fault,’ she added, tickling the curl of hair behind his ear. ‘You handed me such a great lead.’

  He gave a rueful chuckle. ‘I’ve always been my own worst enemy.’

  32

  Jason swivelled round in his chair when Karen walked into the HCU office. ‘So, are we going to Stockport, boss?’ he asked, cheery as a small child on the first day of the school holidays.

  ‘Maybe later,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a few things I need to sort out first.’

  He looked disappointed. ‘Oh. OK. What do you want me to get on with in the meantime?’

  ‘We know where the car was registered to Barry McAndrew. That’s our best lead right now. Let’s see if we can save ourselves some running around when we get down there and maybe find our missing person turning up anywhere else. Check electoral rolls and council tax registers for Daniella Gilmartin, Barry McAndrew and Amanda McAndrew. Go back to HMRC, try the Department of Health and Social Care, see if Dani’s signing on for the dreaded Universal Credit.’ It was make-work, in all probability, but making Jason feel useful was always a positive.

  ‘OK.’ He turned back to his screen then swung back to face her. ‘Boss?’

  ‘Jason.’

  ‘See, if somebody was going to buy somebody a ring, how would you know what size to get?’ His ears pinked.

  ‘Are you planning on asking Eilidh to marry you?’ Karen hoped her surprise didn’t show. Eilidh was a nice enough lassie; however, she hadn’t thought they were that serious. ‘Is that not a bit soon?’

  ‘We’ve known each other the best part of a year. And I really like her,’ he said. The blood was rising from his neck to his cheeks. ‘And I think she really likes me and we get along great. I’ve never met anybody that I wanted to be with like I want to be with her.’

  Karen felt a genuine surge of happiness. Her initial frustration with Jason’s limitations had mellowed into a real warmth and a respect for his willingness to work hard. He never complained even when she loaded him with tasks that would have made her weep at their prosaic repetitiveness, and she couldn’t deny he was a far better cop than he’d been when he’d first arrived on the team. But most of all, he’d looked up to Phil and loved him like the big brother he wished he’d had instead of the feckless and amoral Ronan. How could she not be pleased for the good fortune of someone who had cared that much for Phil? And if he brought that same loyalty to Eilidh, who was she to say ‘too young’?

  ‘All good reasons to want to put a ring on her finger. Does she wear other rings?’

  ‘Not when she’s working. She says she has to be careful not to get them tangled in her clients’ hair. If she was a barber, it wouldn’t be a problem. But being a ladies’ stylist, she could easy get a fancy ring caught in a tangle.’

  ‘
What about when you’re going out and she gets dressed up?’

  Jason’s brow furrowed in thought. ‘Sometimes, yeah,’ he said at last. ‘She’s got some of those big rings. Kinda bling, you know what I mean?’

  Karen smiled. ‘Then all you need to do is sneak one of them out of her jewellery box and take it to a jeweller’s. They can tell you what size it is. And that’s a pretty good guide. If it ends up being a bit too big, it’s easy enough to get it taken down a size. Just make sure it’s not a pinkie ring, though.’ With Jason, it never hurt to state the obvious.

  His face lit up. ‘Thanks, boss. That’s a brilliant idea.’

  ‘Good luck, Jason. I hope she realises she’s already got a diamond and says yes.’

  Beaming, he said, ‘I don’t know about that, but I’ll tell her you said it.’

  ‘And, Jason?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You should also tell her that if she breaks your heart, I will break her legs.’

  His eyes widened in shock. ‘You’re joking, right?’

  ‘You think?’ She let a tiny smile creep across her lips. ‘Now get on with your work.’ She turned her attention to her screen. She wondered whether there was any point in trying to find someone at the College of Art who would remember David Greig as a student. She suspected it wasn’t the sort of institution where they’d have yearbooks or matriculation photos. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. A quick search revealed an email address for their alumni organisation, so she fired off an email asking them to contact her. Not that anyone would read it before Monday morning.

  Now Hamish had made sense of the notations on the back of the newspaper printout, her next task was to see whether Mary Auld could shed any light on them. She toyed for a moment with the idea of sending Daisy to see her, but Karen had to acknowledge she wanted to gauge Mary’s reaction herself.

  Mary’s phone rang out several times before she picked up. ‘This is Mary Auld,’ she said, oddly formal.

  ‘DCI Pirie here. I’m sorry to bother you again but there’s something I wanted to ask you about.’

  ‘It had better be useful rather than a bother, Chief Inspector,’ she sighed. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Did you know your husband when he was at Oxford?’

  ‘No, we didn’t meet till he came back to Edinburgh. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I know it sounds a bit bizarre, but we have to follow up every thread of an investigation. I wondered whether Iain did any acting when he was a student?’

  A pause. Karen interpreted it as stunned silence, but she was wrong. ‘It’s very odd that you should ask that,’ Mary said slowly. ‘Yes, he did. He was quite keen on am-drams at university and afterwards. Well into his twenties, in fact. But you asking isn’t what’s odd.’

  Sometimes the timbre of a conversation shifted and Karen knew that something important was coming. She didn’t always recognise why it was significant at the time, but the feeling always made her mark it with a mental asterisk. ‘What is it that’s odd, Mary?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘I had a phone call a few weeks ago from a woman called Verity Foggo. She’s an actress. She pops up on TV sometimes, but she works primarily on stage. Iain knew her from Oxford, they were both in a Shakespeare production.’

  Karen realised she was holding her breath and slowly let it out. ‘What play, do you remember?’

  ‘It was Twelfth Night. Verity played Viola and Iain, Antonio.’

  ‘And she called you out of the blue?’

  ‘Yes, it was a surprise. We’d met up with her for drinks a few times, in London. But we hadn’t been in touch since Iain’s funeral.’

  ‘Why did she contact you?’

  Another pause. ‘It was quite peculiar. She asked if I was still in touch with Jamie. I explained that the police had been treating him as a suspect in Iain’s disappearance so he’d gone on the run because he couldn’t bear it. She said she knew all that, but she didn’t believe Jamie would have cut himself off from family. She said she wanted Jamie’s email so she could get hold of him.’ Mary sounded puzzled.

  ‘I don’t understand. Why did she want to be in touch with Jamie?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. I’m not entirely sure. She said she’d got to know Jamie when Iain was at Oxford. They’d gone out together once or twice, she said, though that was the first I’d heard of it.’

  ‘Fair enough, but why did she want to get back in touch with him now?’

  ‘She told me some tale about a burst pipe in her storage unit. Apparently she’d lost a whole archive box, including all the photographs from the Twelfth Night production. Jamie had taken the photographs of the production and she wanted to contact him on the off-chance that he still had the negatives, or at least some of the prints.’

  ‘So what did you say to her?’

  ‘I said that even if I did know how to contact Jamie, I’d be a fool to give his details to anyone. As far as I knew, the police still thought he was a person of interest in Iain’s disappearance. And besides, why would he have gone on the run with her photographs?’

  Karen could make no sense of any of this. It didn’t fit any of her theories about the case. And it certainly didn’t shed any light on James Auld’s death. ‘So how did you leave it?’

  ‘I told her I couldn’t help her.’

  ‘Did you tell Jamie?’

  ‘Oh yes, there was no reason not to. I mentioned it the next time we spoke on the phone. He was as baffled as I was.’

  ‘Did he follow it up, do you know?’

  ‘He didn’t mention it, so I assume he didn’t. I mean, why would you? Some self-obsessed actress who thinks he’d been carting round her picture for the last thirty years? I know it’s a cliché, but really, actors . . . It’s always about them, isn’t it?’

  What little experience Karen had had with actors had left her thinking their egos were no more monstrous than average. If anything, they were more fragile because their living was dependent on the good opinion of others. But she wasn’t about to get into that with Mary Auld. ‘You’re right, I’m sure Jamie would have told you if he’d reached out to her. I expect the notes we found were what he scribbled down when you were talking on the phone.’

  ‘That would make sense.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you with something so trivial. But in a murder inquiry, we have to eliminate everything, no matter how trivial it seems.’

  ‘I understand. I only wish your colleagues had been so thorough when Iain disappeared,’ she said tartly.

  And that was the end of that conversation. Karen stared at the name she’d written down. Verity Foggo. Where did she fit in? Did she fit in at all? Or was she the equivalent of a rogue piece from another jigsaw altogether? Her head was nipping with the disparate elements of the case, not to mention the ongoing matter of the skeleton in the camper van; she needed a sounding board whose judgement she could trust. Once that would have been Phil, and this was one area where Hamish could never replace him.

  She sighed, and googled Verity Foggo. Judging by the results, she worked more than most actors. She appeared to be one of those jobbing performers who never gets the lead role but often turns up in the middle of the cast list. Karen clicked on ‘images’. Verity Foggo looked vaguely familiar, and Karen recognised some of her TV credits as episodes in series she’d watched. But she wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a line-up. She checked her out on Twitter and discovered she was currently appearing in Glasgow in a touring production of something called Hyde and Seek by a playwright she’d never heard of. For once the stars were aligned in her favour, it seemed.

  But before she could act on her discovery, her phone rang. It was an unfamiliar Edinburgh number. ‘DCI Pirie, Historic Cases Unit,’ she recited.

  ‘Oh, hello? This is Sonja Hall from Edinburgh College of Art’s alumni office? You emailed us earli
er?’

  Unsure why someone with a Glasgow accent felt the need to make every sentence a question, Karen said, ‘I did, yes. Thanks for getting back to me.’

  ‘No bother, really? I’m not usually in on a Saturday, but we’re about to launch a big fundraising appeal and I had to make sure the “giving” page was running right? So, here’s the thing? We have a strict GDPR policy at the College of Art so I can’t personally give you any details of alumni?’

  ‘I thought that might be the case. But—’

  ‘See, what I can do, and what I have in actual fact done, is contact former students on the painting course from those years that we’ve got details for on file and asked them to get in touch with you?’

  Karen unravelled the sentence. ‘That’s great, thanks, I appreciate that.’

  ‘I don’t know how much help it will be? Because we didn’t have such good contacts with graduates back then? So there’s only half a dozen on our list?’

  One would be enough, if it was the right one. ‘Hopefully that’ll do.’

  ‘Sure but see, one of the lecturers who taught that course, he’s still on the staff? I thought maybe he would be able to help so I asked him?’

  ‘He’s still there from twenty-eight years ago?’

  A giggle. ‘I know, it’s incredible, isn’t it? Anyway, he remembers David Greig really well, he was kind of his mentor?’

  ‘Can you put me in touch with him?’

  ‘He’s going to call you, if that’s OK? I just wanted to give you a wee heads-up, so it wouldn’t come at you out of the blue, like? His name’s Alasdair Darnley?’

  ‘Sonja, that is brilliant. I can’t thank you enough.’ Now get off the line and let me talk to the man who is going to make David Greig come alive for me.

  ‘No worries, it’s great to get such an interesting query, mostly it’s dead straightforward, you know? Your job must be totally fascinating?’

  ‘It has its moments. Thanks again.’ Karen ended the call, then sat drumming her fingers on the desk. Seven minutes dragged by before the phone rang again. She grabbed it on the first ring. ‘DCI Pirie, Historic Cases Unit,’ she gabbled.