‘What makes you think Susan is behind the missing stuff and not her?’ Dorothy said.
‘Because Monika is lovely, and Susan isn’t.’
Hannah frowned at that piece of impeccable logic.
Dorothy nodded. ‘Well, we might have to widen the search times if we don’t find anything with Susan.’
‘Fine,’ Jacob said.
Hannah found a spot in the corner of a bookshelf, pushed the camera cube into the shadows, shifted the angle slightly until she was happy.
In the kitchen she placed one on the underside of the extraction fan hood above the cooker, then in the study she propped one up inside the grate of the unused fireplace. Upstairs she went into Jacob’s bedroom, another dowdy space with little light. She wondered about that for the clarity of pictures on the camera footage, but nothing could be done. There were sliding mirrored doors on a wardrobe, left open, and she placed the camera on a high shelf, obscured from below by a scarf.
Out in the hall there weren’t many places to choose from, but she eventually settled on the top of the curtain pole across the window that looked over the green expanse of the Braids.
She looked around. This was a big house with five bedrooms, this floor on its own was bigger than her flat. Totally wasted on a single old man, but there you go. It was his home and his right to live wherever the hell he wanted.
She listened to Dorothy and Jacob’s voices drifting up the stairs. It reminded her of being a kid, hearing her mum and dad talk through the wall as she lay in bed cuddling a teddy. The security of that murmur, the realisation that they were there for her.
But of course they weren’t. Not really, in the end. They had split up and she had grown up, and everything changed. And here she was, spying on an old man’s carer to see if she was betraying him. She wondered about Peter and Mel and the email he mentioned. Maybe more betrayal. Then she slowly walked down the stairs, imagined herself back in time, her mum and dad together on their sofa downstairs, the world still comforting and reliable.
20
DOROTHY
Dorothy stared out of the window. Three teenagers were flipping a Frisbee to each other across the park, unnervingly accurate. Who has the time to get good at Frisbee? They wore clothes that looked like they were from the 1980s, mismatched, flammable primary colours and patterns. She had the phone pressed to her ear as she listened to the ring. She knew the address was on the shore at Newhaven and pictured a seascape, choppy waters all the way to Fife.
‘Hello, what do you want?’
The voice was working-class Edinburgh, impatient and tired. Dorothy heard kids’ television in the background. Lorna Daniels left the police to become a mum and never returned.
‘Hi, sorry to bother you.’
‘Are you?’
Dorothy wished she’d gone to visit the woman, maybe face-to-face would get a better result. The address was one of the new apartments on Sandpiper Road, no sense of community, thrown up next to holiday rentals and cheap hotels, spread amongst waste ground and disused dockland on the edge of Leith. She could imagine how you might feel isolated, stuck there all day.
‘My name is Dorothy Skelf, are you Lorna Daniels?’
‘Whatever you’re selling, I’m not interested.’
‘I was given your number by Thomas Olsson at the Pleasance Police Station.’
‘Thomas gave you my number?’
‘He’s a friend of mine and he thought you might be able to help me.’
Dorothy heard a child whine in the background, something about a sweetie. The sound went muffled at the other end then came back.
‘How?’
‘Maybe it would be better if we met up?’
The woman laughed, an exasperated sound. ‘Do I sound like I’ve got time to meet you for a latte?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ll get to the point. It’s about a case you worked on.’
‘I’m not supposed to talk about that stuff.’
‘I understand, but this wouldn’t betray any confidences.’
‘Which case?’
‘A missing person, Simon Lawrence.’
A pause down the line. The sound of a cigarette being sucked?
‘Doesn’t ring any bells, when was this?’
‘July 2010.’
This time the laugh was full-throated. Outside Dorothy’s window a dog had leapt into the air and intercepted the Frisbee and was teasing the students with it, darting out of reach.
‘Christ, that’s ten years ago,’ Lorna said.
‘I realise that, but you’d be doing me a favour if you could remember something, anything at all.’
‘Lady, I can’t remember what I was doing two hours ago, motherhood brain melt. There’s no way I remember a missing-person case from a decade ago.’
Schrödinger sloped into the room and wandered around the far wall, not looking at Dorothy. She watched him pace across the floor.
‘He had a pregnant wife, Rebecca, lived in Craigentinny.’
‘What was your name again?’
‘Dorothy Skelf.’
Another pause, another drag on the cigarette.
‘As in the undertakers?’ Lorna said eventually.
‘That’s right,’ Dorothy said. Schrödinger was at the bay window now, head still turned away as if hiding something. ‘Simon Lawrence used to work here.’
‘I remember.’
Schrödinger turned. He had something in his mouth. He took a few steps forwards and placed it at Dorothy’s feet. Another bird, goddamn it. This time a sparrow, one of the knot that flurried around the feeders in the garden. They were placed high so he couldn’t reach them, but this one must’ve been a straggler.
Dorothy stuck out her foot to scoot the cat away, and he slunk behind a chair, turned and stared at her.
‘What exactly do you remember?’ she said.
‘The wife was up to high doh about it.’
Dorothy hadn’t heard that in a while, meaning anxious and exasperated. One of the Scottish phrases she had to get used to when she first arrived.
‘And?’
An exhale down the phone, definitely smoking. ‘And nothing. I did all the usual stuff, spoke to friends and family, checked his phone and bank account. No trace.’
‘What about at work?’
‘I went to the funeral home. Do you work there?’
Dorothy stared at the dead sparrow on the floor. Its chest punctured with teeth marks, loose plumage drifting in the swirls of air caused by Dorothy’s movement. ‘Yes, it’s my business now.’
‘I spoke to the owner, nice old guy.’
‘Jim.’
‘And a younger guy who did odd jobs.’
‘Do you remember what they said?’
‘If there was anything suspicious it would be in my notes. Did Thomas show you them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s all there is.’
‘But how did they seem, the men at the funeral home?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What were they like when you spoke to them?’
Dorothy wanted a corner to pick at.
‘They were just regular guys,’ Lorna said. ‘You work with them, right?’
Schrödinger approached on his haunches, like it was a game. Dorothy thought she saw the sparrow’s chest rise, but maybe it was just a shimmer of feathers.
‘So what was your hunch about Simon?’
Lorna laughed, a friendlier sound than before. ‘It’s not about hunches.’
‘You must’ve had some opinion about what happened.’
A pause, no sound of inhalation, maybe the cigarette was finished. ‘Honestly, I can’t remember. But if you’re asking me now, with his pregnant wife and all, I think he just panicked and left, changed his name and started over somewhere else. Maybe he’s got another wife and kid now.’
Another wife and kid. Dorothy let that roll around her head.
There was a clatter in the background down the phone and a child’s
wail.
‘To be honest,’ Lorna said, ‘I wouldn’t mind that myself, disappearing and starting again. Who doesn’t dream of that?’
Dorothy glanced out of the window. The kids had got the Frisbee back from the dog and had stretched into a wider triangle. They were hurling it fifty yards, still landing it in each other’s hands.
‘I have to go,’ Lorna said.
‘Thank you,’ Dorothy said. ‘I really appreciate it.’
‘I hope you find what you’re looking for, whatever that is.’
Then she was gone, just the dial tone.
Another wife and kid. A secret life. Starting over again.
Dorothy stared at Schrödinger, who was sitting in a strip of sunlight on the chair. She picked up the sparrow from the floor, felt the tiny weight of it in her hand. She wanted to sense life, breathing, but there was nothing.
‘Goddamn cat,’ she said, putting the sparrow in the bin.
She went to the sink and washed her hands, rubbing for longer than necessary, trying to scrub the death from her fingertips. Then she headed downstairs and through to the embalming room.
Archie was wearing blue plastic gloves, and holding a scalpel over an elderly man with his chest bared. He made a deep vertical incision in the chest, just below the left side of the collarbone. He looked up and nodded at the corpse.
‘William Baxter,’ he said. ‘Pacemaker.’
They had to remove pacemakers by law in case they exploded in the crem furnace. Dorothy always wondered about the first time that happened, if anyone was injured or even killed. A last revenge from beyond the grave. She answered questions about it all the time at funerals because of a famous Scottish novel that opened with someone’s grandmother exploding that way.
Archie kept going over the same incision, making it longer and deeper. He pulled the skin apart to expose the flesh beneath. It moved under his fingers like a joint of meat in a butcher’s hands, nothing more. But this was something more, this was William with his dodgy heart, beloved by family and friends.
‘I want to ask you something,’ Dorothy said.
Archie picked up the scalpel again and widened the cut. Dorothy saw a glint of metal in the wound.
‘Yeah?’
‘About Simon Lawrence.’
Archie pulled the skin at either side of the cut and Dorothy saw more of the brushed-metal disc inside.
‘You already asked me about him,’ Archie said, head down in concentration. His fingers probed inside, peeling back layers and digging in.
‘I thought you might have forgotten something.’
She came closer, staring at the top of Archie’s head, watching his movements. She glanced at the body on the slab, sunken cheeks and chest, withered arms, wispy white hair on his chest, stubble on his chin. It was a myth that hair and nails kept growing on a body after death. The body starts to dehydrate as soon as you die and the skin shrinks and tightens around the corpse, exposing hair that was under the surface.
Archie stuck the scalpel in the hole, severing the sutures that kept the pacemaker in place, then he flipped his fingers and the disc popped out. It was an old one, the size of a flattened yo-yo, and must’ve felt obvious to the touch. It was linked via two wires at a clunky connector, the wires disappearing into the body, through the ribs into the heart. Archie snipped the wires and pushed the ends into the wound, squidging the flesh together and placing the pacemaker on a tray by his side.
He looked up. ‘Forgotten something?’
Dorothy thought there was something in his eyes, a guardedness. ‘Tell me again what you remember.’
‘He was working here when I started,’ Archie said, dropping the scalpel and picking up a surgical needle and thread. ‘Doing the same as me, really. Driving, putting the coffins together, picking up bodies.’
‘What else?’
‘He was quiet, didn’t say much.’
‘What do you remember about him stopping working here?’
Archie made a couple of loops through, drawing the flesh together at the bottom of the cut, tugging it tight. It didn’t have to be neat, no one was going to see it, but Archie did a tidy job all the same.
‘What’s this about?’ he said. ‘There’s something you’re not telling me.’
‘Did you speak to the police?’
Archie looked puzzled. ‘Why would I talk to the police?’
‘Simon Lawrence disappeared.’
‘What?’
‘He didn’t get a job in an office.’
Archie shook his head. ‘That’s just what I assumed, maybe Jim told me.’
‘He just vanished.’
‘After he quit here, you mean?’
Dorothy looked at the needle in Archie’s hand, the half-closed wound on the body. ‘I don’t think he quit, I think he went missing.’
‘But you would’ve known about that, wouldn’t you?’
Dorothy put her hand out to touch the metal table, the cold of it reassuring. ‘I didn’t know anything about it.’
‘Well, then.’
‘You don’t understand, Jim lied about it.’
‘Why would he?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’
Archie made another stitch in the skin.
Dorothy leaned in. ‘What I’m trying to work out is whether you’re lying to me too.’
Archie straightened up. ‘I’m not lying.’
Dorothy pressed her lips together, pushed herself away from the table. ‘I talked to the police officer who looked into the case. She said she spoke to two people here about Simon.’
Archie held the needle tight in his gloved hand. ‘I never spoke to the police, I would remember that.’
‘Either you’re lying or she’s lying.’
Archie stood there, his hands resting on William’s chest. ‘This is, what, ten years ago? Maybe the officer remembered wrongly. Maybe she spoke to Jim and someone else.’
‘There was no one else here back then.’
‘Well, maybe she spoke to someone somewhere else and she’s conflating the two.’
Archie looked at her and she held his gaze. She wanted to tell something from his expression, but she wasn’t sure at all.
Archie rolled his tongue inside his cheek. ‘Why do you care anyway? It’s ancient history.’
Dorothy thought about the bank account, the money. She thought about Rebecca in Craigentinny bringing up her daughter, no husband to help. She thought about Jim’s life assurance lie, Rebecca accepting the money without caring. She thought about Jim talking to the police about Simon but never mentioning it, she thought about an employee vanishing, ceasing to exist, just like William Baxter here.
‘It’s not ancient history at all,’ she said.
Archie waited for her to elaborate, but she couldn’t think what to say. If Jim lied then nothing was certain. Her life was built on sand and she didn’t know how to cope.
She shook her head.
Archie went back to work, sewing up William’s chest, repairing the wound even though there was no need.
21
JENNY
Liam Hook was senior communications manager in the statistics department of the Scottish government, whatever that entailed. Orla had emailed Jenny a bunch of information about him, but the work stuff was written in management speak, impossible to penetrate.
Jenny sat in the body-collection van in a cobbled lane round the back of Commercial Street in Leith. She could see the main entrance of the government building on Victoria Quay, a giant office block that had kick-started Leith’s regeneration a while back. She was in a private permit space and looked around nervously. Tailing someone was hard. She’d parked outside Orla and Liam’s house in Craigleith this morning, but he left for work on foot then got a bus. You never saw that in American movies, someone trailing a bus in a body van. He’d gone to work as expected, so she didn’t know what to do then. She’d parked legitimately and walked to a café along the road, taken her laptop and gone
over some of Orla’s information, but the price of parking was crazy and she had to return to the van to move it.
Liam didn’t emerge at lunchtime, at least not from the front entrance. There were other ways out of the building, he could head towards Ocean Terminal or the restaurants along the Water of Leith. So really, Jenny was on a hiding to nothing.
She drove around in the afternoon bored out of her skull then returned at half past four. Orla told her that he normally finished at five but was planning to work late. If he really was working late Jenny could sit here forever, but if he went somewhere else she might have a chance. Although he’d seen her at the funeral, she hoped he wouldn’t recognise her. In these circumstances, different clothes, her hair tucked into a beanie, she might get away with it. Of course he might’ve already left, in which case she’d wasted a day. Being a private investigator was so annoying.
At five, a rush of workers spilled from the building, heading to cars or the bus, a few stopping at the outside tables of bars, ready to drown their sorrows. The crowds petered out and Jenny looked along the road for a traffic warden or nosy local ready to give her grief for not having a permit.
She was wondering if this was a waste of time when she spotted him coming out of the office. He was tall and broad, not muscle-bound but solid all the same, wavy black hair and a black suit that fit his body well. The suit looked more expensive than your typical civil-service outfit.
She shrank down in the car as he passed then watched as he turned along the lane. She got out, looked again for traffic wardens, then followed. Finally she felt like a PI, collar up, following some guy wherever he went. She had no plan, but maybe that’s all this job was, following people until something interesting happened.
He didn’t look round, didn’t suspect. He went over the Water of Leith and along Bernard Street then turned into the narrow lane of Maritime Street. This was old Leith, ancient bonded warehouses, some turned into hipster offices, others still derelict. There were fewer people in the street now and she saw him disappear into a tiny vennel. She reached the vennel moments later, slowed but didn’t stop, glanced in. Just a little square, a dead end flanked by terraced buildings, old brick and thick walls, low doorways set back from the cobbles.
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