by Denise Mina
‘Aye,’ smiled Morrow. ‘It that you?’
‘I suppose it is.’ He turned his attention to Thankless. ‘And who’s this one?’
Thankless smiled beneficently and held his hand out. ‘I’m DC Thankless of Police Scotland.’
Halliday showed his brown teeth, a little bit aggressively, and shook Thankless’s hand. ‘Well, son, I’m Me of Here.’
They uncoupled their hands and Halliday turned to Morrow.
‘So, I’m saying: I was asleep yesterday morning, that’s my bedroom up there’–he pointed to a small window at the top right of the farmhouse–‘until about five o’clock. Dogs woke me up, barking. They did it another couple of times.’
‘You didn’t get up, though?’
His hand strayed to the dog’s head. ‘The dogs always get up afore me. I was up late, watching Breaking Bad, have you seen it?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll tell ye what,’ he nodded solemnly, ‘certainly make ye circumspect about what ye stick your nose into.’
Argyle and Bute was one of the safest areas in the country but she could imagine Mr Halliday cowering under his covers, watching headlights stroke the artex on his ceiling: Mr Fear of Crime.
‘Not that I’ve got anything worth robbing, mind.’
‘I thought all farmers were millionaires.’
Mr Halliday huffed at that. ‘Did ye, indeed? Ye’ve been listening to The Archers, mibbi. I never used to worry but, you know, ye get old, you get scared.’
‘I’m not old,’ said Morrow, ‘and I’m scared all the time.’
He liked that. He pointed up to his ‘Yes’ window signs and confided, ‘There’s people about here would burn ye out for that.’
Tempers were running high, she knew that, but there was a lot of paranoia, and both sides were vying for gold in the coveted victim stakes.
‘I thought it was a blanket “No” out here.’
‘Oh, it is. It is indeed.’ He looked over her shoulder, as if ‘No’ assassins might be hiding in the hedgerows. ‘Because of the property prices.’
‘You not worried?’
He looked at her defiantly. ‘Nah! I’m not scared. Lots of them out here are though. Protecting themselves. You wouldn’t believe it. And they’re nasty. The council are a bunch of masons. They’ve let the “No” mob set up a campaign gazebo in the square. No planning permission. Nothing.’
It seemed an oddly comedic thing to object to. ‘Have you been threatened by anyone in particular?’
‘No, just in general.’ He shrugged and smiled. ‘I’m retiring. I’ll say what I like. And I don’t care if I lose out personally. If Scotland can finally—’
‘No!’ Morrow held her hand up. ‘Please! No!’ She couldn’t live through another monologue about politics. Everyone in Scotland had one ready.
Mr Halliday misunderstood and nodded. ‘I know. ’Cause you’re the police. You can’t get involved.’
She let him believe that and showed him the picture of Roxanna’s face from the orchid house picture, singled out and enlarged. He didn’t recognise her.
‘What sort of car did you see pulling out?’
He stepped down into the road and pointed at the photographer’s car. ‘See that red one there? That kind. But silver.’
Hoping he couldn’t see the window sticker, she stepped back and looked. It had a distinctive indent in the side panel, like a shadow under a cheekbone. ‘You didn’t happen to get the registration number?’
‘’Fraid not.’
‘Where’s the black car you found?’
Mr Halliday led them to a field and lifted the chain off the gate, walking the gate back into the yard to let them in. He led them along the fence to the back of the shed. The black Alfa Romeo 4C Morrow had been watching footage of for three weeks was blocking the entire lane by the field. It was hidden from the road and the farmhouse. She could see why Mr Halliday hadn’t found it for a day. It was in a space so small Roxanna would have had trouble climbing out of the driver’s door. They walked over to the fence to look in.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Halliday, and went back to his dogs.
No blood, no handbag, nothing out of the ordinary. Morrow pulled on a plastic glove and tried the back passenger door. It was unlocked.
The photographer was stepping cautiously over the muddy field towards them. She had already photographed inside the car, she said, and then gone uphill for wider shots of the situ, but she was on the clock and had to leave. Everything was about the numbers these days.
‘Was the car unlocked when you found it?’
‘Yeah. You might want to look in the glovebox as well.’
‘OK.’ Morrow watched her walk away before she remembered: ‘Hey–lose the “No” sticker. You’re on police business.’
The photographer rolled her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry. My car broke down, it’s my dad’s car.’
‘Well, cover the sticker up if you’re using it.’
‘I’m a “Yes” anyway,’ she said.
‘Yeah, well, I don’t want to know your private business. Just cover the sticker up.’
The photographer nodded and backed away.
Morrow turned her attention to the car. For a Londoner to leave their car door unlocked probably meant Roxanna had stayed nearby. It meant she intended to get back in.
Feeling suddenly very cold, Morrow told Thankless to go and check the field for phones or anything at all. He went off and she lifted her coat, stepping over the wire fence. She opened the car door, reached in and let the glovebox fall open.
A blue freezer bag with Waitrose printed on it. It was secured with a white wire, a bulge of white powder in the corner. The contents box hadn’t been filled out but she could guess. She bagged it up as evidence and looked at the floor for anything else. It was strange: Roxanna had driven for twelve hours, through the night, but the floor was almost sterile. There were no stray blond hairs, no pastry flakes, no single blade of grass dragged in on the sole of a shoe. It had been vacuumed.
Morrow looked at the door and the steering wheel closely, checking for fingerprints or palm smudges. Both had been wiped clean. She squinted at a residue on the door handle: alcohol wipes. She knew the sort of marks they left because they used them on the fingerprint machine at the station after someone had been brought in and charged, always aware of the danger of hep. C transmission. They had to use alcohol sanitiser a lot in their uniform days and it was rough on the hands. Morrow could still remember the raw-fingertip feel.
She shut the door carefully and phoned the station: Get a forensic tow truck out here right now and send McGrain and Kerrigan. She needed bodies to escort evidence into the station. Airtight cases fell on the basis of faulty chains of evidence. She could already hear a lawyer cross-examining Mr Halliday: And the car was left unlocked by a field for how long?
Thankless was in the field, slowly walking away from her as he scanned the ground beneath him. She walked over to him. ‘Find anything?’
‘No, thank God.’ He was relieved not to have stumbled across anything gruesome. But Morrow felt that maybe she had: the alcohol wipes suggested premeditation. They were ominous. Most people would use the sleeve of their jacket to wipe prints off.
She straightened up and suddenly saw the spectacular view. A lush green run of fields dropped down to meet the glinting water. The hills rose, green again, on the far bank. Smiling, she looked down the coast to her right and saw Helensburgh laid out in a neat grid, the rain-drizzled roads silvered by sunshine.
‘I actually know Helensburgh really quite well.’
He was telling her he was an asset. She didn’t want to encourage him so she just looked away. ‘Yeah, it’s old.’
‘Actually, no. It’s only three hundred years old. It was built as a luxury holiday town. The founder named it after his wife—’
‘I know.’ She didn’t know that, but he was interrupting her train of thought.
He tried to impress again. ‘Did you kn
ow: a quarter of all the millionaires in Britain lived there at one time?’
That was quite interesting, if irrelevant. Morrow stayed silent. She looked over to where the street grid ran out and big trees and lawns intermingled up the early slopes of the surrounding hills.
‘I know it well because I was in the Sea Cadets. We went sailing over there at the outdoor centre.’ He pointed to a distant coppice of masts.
Morrow nodded in the right direction, thinking about the alcohol wipes. Buoyed by her lack of hostility Thankless asked, ‘Were you in Cadets?’
‘No,’ said Morrow.
‘It was great. I loved it.’
She wondered why they were talking like this, exchanging personal information as if they were friends. It was the setting. Being near the water made the trip feel like a holiday.
‘D’you know that area of Helensburgh up by the—’
‘Never been.’ She cut the comradely thread abruptly with, ‘We were Largs people,’ and headed for the car. She glanced back and saw Thankless looking sheepishly across the water to Largs.
The two towns were on opposite banks of the wide estuary, each looking diffidently away. Helensburgh was three hundred years old, pretty and stood on its dignity. Largs was a thousand years old and didn’t care what anyone thought. It had seen Viking battles and German bombers, the Black Death and the EU. It was a place of ice cream parlours, vulgar amusement arcades, chips and sweets and pocket-money toys. It was a working-class day out. Helensburgh was aspirational.
He caught her up at the car. ‘Well, if I win the lottery I’d live out here. All that fresh air—’
‘I don’t like the country,’ said Morrow.
‘Why?’ He was smiling at her, surprised and patronising, about to explain why she was so very wrong and ‘the country’ was a great thing.
‘The shops are shit,’ she said. ‘Anyway, cut the chat. You phone the station and make sure Kerrigan’s bringing the forensic team.’ Kerrigan was, Morrow knew she was. She was just giving Thankless a job to do to remind him she was in charge.
She walked away, glad to have shut him up but disappointed in herself. It was her problem. She’d hated bosses for behaving like this to her. She hated them for doing it now. She thought of DCC Hughes walking out of the meeting before people had finished speaking.
Back at the gate Morrow glanced once more at the beguiling view. Wind rolling up from the water swept a soft Mexican wave across a rapeseed field.
Morrow felt in her gut that Roxanna was probably dead. Alcohol wipes and a handheld vacuum for the floor of the car. It was professional and it was serious. There were no professional hit men in Helensburgh, just fat men in tracksuits stabbing rivals for a fist of fifty quid notes. A professional would have been conspicuous in such a small community.
She took out her phone and called CI Nolly Dent.
15
Leaving the lunch time rush in the café behind him, Boyd Fraser began to run, heavy-footed. He had forty minutes before he had to begin preparations for the charity dinner. He blamed his trainers at first, then remembered that he always blamed the trainers, that he didn’t actually like running.
He ran straight west, staying away from the unbroken shore road to give himself an excuse to stop at the crossroads and catch his breath. The black asphalt glistened and an electric car startled him as it ghosted past, wheels hissing the rain from the road.
He wasn’t enjoying the run. The wind annoyed him. Cars and pedestrians got in his way, everything hurt. He had been very fit once, running the London Marathon. He even beat his training partner’s time by three minutes, something Sanjay never really forgave him for. Now Boyd was always comparing himself to that never-again peak of fitness. But he ploughed on, passing rustic houses, sailing houses, the entry gate to a Neo-Gothic castle. He felt his shoulders rounded from leaning over work surfaces and account books, from picking up kids and crates of milk.
Meeting Miss Grierson yesterday had disturbed him. It created in his mind an unbroken timeline between then and now, as if he had never been to UCL or spent fifteen years in London or camper-vanned or surfed in Cornwall, as if he’d always been here and Lucy and the kids had magically appeared in the town of his birth.
While he was away, at university, on his travels, he’d cast himself unhappy in Helensburgh, trapped by the oppressive propriety of his home life, the coldness of his father. The dry Sunday School days, crayoned pictures of Jesus, the smog of family history and the weight of expectation. They were the good Frasers, the righteous elect. His mother thought that everything that went her way was part of God’s plan. Everything else was the work of Catholics and Anglicans.
But meeting Miss Grierson took his mood back to that time, reminded him of what growing up here was really like: it was quite pleasant. His parents were kind and gentle people, bigoted, a little rigid, but well meaning. The desire to rip things up, the bitterness, the sneering, those were Boyd’s own. He wished he hadn’t given Miss Grierson a job tonight. He didn’t want to see her again.
Boyd puffed on, troubled by the realisation that he had never really suffered terribly much and should be happy. But he wasn’t. Whoever’s fault it was, the fact remained: he wasn’t. He felt sorry for himself. He felt cheated of something vital and he didn’t know what it was.
He shook his head as he approached a road, shrugging off the thought. Why did he feel so sorry for himself? He couldn’t remember.
He stopped at the kerb: Lucy. Lucy was pissed off all the time. It was the pressure of work, starting a business, sleeplessness because of the kids. It was one of those. Feeling relieved, as if he made sense again, he ran on. It was the pressure of court life. Marie Antoinette.
He was back to the fucking Hameau again. Annoyed at the intrusive thought, at his weak legs and his weight gain, he turned and ran downhill towards the water, stopping to let a Waitrose van pass. Fucking Waitrose stealing customers and allergy bastards, Waitrose turning the whole town into a retirement village for bank managers.
Fuelled by anger, he was going quite fast now. He thought back to Sanjay and the jagged competitive edge between them. That’s what he missed. A spur to get him to his personal best. A peer group. That’s what he needed.
As if the universe had heard him, he looked up and saw, almost half a mile away down the shore front, a man he vaguely recognised. The man was facing Boyd, leaning against an electricity substation. His head was shaved, he wore a tracksuit zipped up over his belly, a cheap gangster, and he was smoking in a louche, cowboyish manner. Boyd knew him but not from the café, just from seeing him around the town. He couldn’t fit a name.
Boyd found he was sprinting towards the man. He could get some sniff from him, or at least he’d know someone. A chemical adventure. Maybe that would do it. A little blowout.
He slowed as he approached and caught the gangster’s eye, stopped to catch his breath and nurse a stitch. The two men stood parallel but apart, nodding hellos.
‘Right?’ panted Boyd.
The cowboy nodded and pushed himself off the wall, hips first, then back and shoulders, finally pushing himself upright by the base of his neck.
‘I know you, do I?’ asked Boyd.
The man dropped his cigarette, grinding it into the ground with a twist of his toe. ‘Who’re you?’
‘Boyd Fraser.’ Boyd needed a breath then, and by the time he’d caught it the moment for asking the cowboy’s name was past.
‘Fraser?’ The cowboy was smirking, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. Fraser was a well-known name in the town.
‘Aye.’ Boyd didn’t usually say ‘aye’. His mother wouldn’t stand for that sort of language.
‘I know a Fraser.’ He walked over to Boyd. For the briefest moment Boyd thought he was about to hit him. Instead he stopped, tilted his head and said, ‘Who’s your da?’
Boyd turned square to him. He was taller than the man, wider on the shoulders and fitter. ‘Reverend Robert Fraser.’
‘Those
ones? You own that café? That Puddle place up at Sinclair Street?’
‘Paddle. Aye.’
The cowboy looked serious and held out his hand. ‘Tommy Farmer.’ English name, cross-border accent but chubby Scottish build: a navy kid.
Boyd shook it. ‘All right, man?’ He didn’t quite know how to broach the subject of where to get a deal. ‘Hey, I don’t suppose you’d know—’
But Tommy had spun away. ‘Murray! Murray Ray! ’Magine bumping into you!’
Boyd had been only vaguely aware of two people ambling towards them down the shore road but the man and the child must have changed pace, hurrying while he wasn’t looking. Now they were standing near and the man had stopped and he looked scared. He held his daughter’s hand tightly. He wore a small ‘Aye’ badge on his lapel but was trying to cover it with his free hand while keeping a frightened eye on Tommy.
Boyd understood that Tommy Farmer was the cause of the fear. He found it exciting. He shifted his weight towards Tommy, sliding behind his shoulder, implying that they were together, though they weren’t.
‘Hiya, Murray.’
‘Hiya, Tommy.’ Murray dropped his gaze, cowed. ‘The badge–I know Mark doesn’t—’
‘Never mind that,’ said Tommy, ‘I’m a “Yes” myself.’
But the badge was not the problem, apparently, because the atmosphere between them didn’t improve.
‘Are you a “Yes”, Boyd?’ Tommy looked at him. Boyd was an emphatic ‘No’ but he could hardly say so. He kind of nodded and the men went back to looking at each other.
Boyd was impatient for the father and child to move along because he had decided on his gambit: Tommy, you don’t happen to know where I could get a bit of sniff, do you? He was rehearsing it in his head. He was waiting for a break.
But Tommy and Murray were eyeballing an acrimonious private conversation. They wouldn’t argue in front of the child because it was a small town, small enough for the children to feel like a collective resource. Grown-ups disguised their enmity to protect the kids and festered threateningly instead. But if Boyd spoke to the girl, kept her busy, the men could talk and Murray would move on.