Blood Salt Water

by Denise Mina

  ‘What was Roxanna here for?’

  Delahunt took a deep breath. ‘OK. It’s a system.’ He sucked his molars, thinking, possibly excising himself from the story. ‘Assets in a trading partnership. Partnership goes dormant,’ he looked up, ‘for whatever reason.’

  ‘Because she’s dead?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Disappeared? Later declared—’

  ‘No! Arrested! Arrested. They wanted her to get arrested. That was all. The man, the father, he wanted the children back. They weren’t supposed to kill her. It shouldn’t have happened that way. No one wanted that but she realised.’ He shut his eyes, exasperated.

  ‘She realised what?’

  Delahunt sighed. ‘One of the children told her that her father had called. He mentioned Maria Arias, so she realised that they knew each other.’

  ‘She went to London to confront her?’

  ‘Well,’ he shook his head in disbelief, ‘that was so stupid. These are not people you threaten, I told her that.’

  ‘Did you warn her when she called you from the field?’

  As she watched him recall that morning he seemed to age. ‘I did. She said she’d been to see Maria. I told her to run. She wouldn’t because of the children. And I decided to go, to convince her.’ Delahunt blinked hard, as if he was trying to wipe something from his mind.

  ‘Was that all you did? Get dressed and drive out to “convince” her?’

  He was ashamed. He couldn’t look at her.

  ‘Or did you call Maria Arias first and tell her where Roxanna was?’

  He sat defensively straight. ‘Maria said I was not to go to the field. She’d told Roxanna to come back to Scotland, sit tight, it would be all right. She said I should just go back to sleep.’

  ‘But you went?’

  ‘I went and Roxanna was gone. And I hoped she had run. I kept hoping that.’

  He looked up, needful of approval or at least understanding.

  ‘Well,’ said Morrow coldly, ‘she didn’t run. Who killed her?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘You’ve been running this dormant company con up here for a while, haven’t you?’

  He shrugged, ‘It’s not a “con”—’

  ‘Did you pitch the idea to the Arias couple?’

  ‘I don’t know them. Bob Ashe and I discussed it. We know each other from the Helensburgh Yacht Club. We just discussed it, that was all. You can’t charge people with discussing things.’

  It was a lawyer’s excuse. ‘Who paid you? Mr Ashe?’

  Delahunt smirked. ‘I wasn’t paid anything.’

  ‘Did Roxanna pay you?’

  ‘I told you, I wasn’t paid.’ He was pleased with himself. Morrow could feel a knee tap coming on.

  ‘They hadn’t paid you yet?’

  ‘No.’

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  ‘Were you given,’ she spoke very carefully, ‘some consideration, in kind, for the services you provided?’

  Delahunt smiled warmly. ‘No! You see, they didn’t pay me. The deal was that Injury Claims gave me a very favourable mortgage.’

  ‘On your house? I thought the housing market was about to collapse out there?’

  ‘The polls all predict a “no” vote. It’ll pick up again and my house has been in my family for four generations. The upkeep is very expensive and with the crash, I’m afraid I invested rather—’

  ‘And the mortgage came from Injury Claims 4 U?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said smugly. ‘It was just a straightforward mortgage on the house. And a condition of the contract was that when the partnership became dormant the mortgage would be vitiated.’

  The Fraud would claw every penny back and that would include Delahunt’s house. Morrow didn’t tell him. She wanted to savour it.

  ‘OK. Frank, do you know Susan Grierson?’

  His smile faded. ‘What?’ He couldn’t seem to follow what was going on suddenly.

  ‘Susan Grierson. Do you know her?’

  He shook his head. ‘I knew her.’

  ‘When?’

  He shook his head at the table. ‘When she was alive I knew her. Why are you asking me about that?’

  ‘Is Susan Grierson not alive?’

  ‘Susan died a year ago. She lived in America. She hadn’t been in Helensburgh for decades. Why on earth are you asking about Susan?’

  ‘How did she die?’

  ‘Breast cancer. She’d lived on Long Island for years, she married Walter Ashe, Bob’s son. They’ve got kids. When the cancer… They moved to Miami, for treatment. Walter and the kids are still there.’

  ‘Bob Ashe, who owned Injury Claims 4 U? Susan Grierson was his daughter-in-law?’

  ‘Yes, he retired there, actually. Did Susan’s name come up on something? A contract or something? What’s going on here?’

  She thought of Susan Grierson’s husband and father-in-law, all the way across the ocean in balmy Miami, hurriedly briefing Abigail Gomez on the small town history, letting her pick her a patsy, describing his dead wife’s past to give her the perfect cover. He would have given her the keys to the house in Sutherland Crescent, Susan’s passport to get into the country. He’d have told her just enough about everyone so that she wasn’t a stranger in a small community, but a native daughter, coming back.

  ‘Why are you asking about Susan?’

  ‘Roxanna’s body was found in Susan Grierson’s house.’

  ‘Sutherland Crescent? Oh dear! That lovely house!’

  It was so odd, his obsession with houses, that Morrow stumbled, ‘Yeah, well, it’s not a lovely house any more. It’s derelict.’

  ‘Yes, it’s been empty for years. Her mother hated Walter Ashe. She left Sutherland Crescent in trust to Susan and Walter’s children. She didn’t want Walter to have it.’

  Morrow took the phone picture of Susan Grierson out of her folder and showed it to him. He shook his head. ‘Susan was short and fat, until the cancer… ’

  He watched her put the picture away. ‘Was that taken in the Victoria Halls? Who actually is that?’

  ‘Why did you go to meet Barratt at Prestwick?’

  ‘To warn him.’ He stopped himself, thinking perhaps he could have chosen a better word. ‘To tell him that Roxanna had disappeared. And about the—’ He caught himself. ‘Some other things.’

  ‘Other things being what?’

  ‘There was a fire. I thought he might not know what had happened… ’

  ‘I’m guessing he knew all about it. How do you know Mark Barratt?’

  His eyes lingered on the file. ‘It’s very small, Helensburgh. Everybody knows everybody.’

  ‘Does everybody come to meet everybody off the plane?’He didn’t answer. He was looking at the file and wondering.

  ‘Did Roxanna tell you she was having trouble with an ex-employee?’

  Delahunt started a defensive lie but stalled. Morrow patted the file, implying that she would tell him who the woman in the picture was if he co-operated. She wouldn’t. He took a deep breath and stalled again, looking at the folder.

  ‘She either did tell you or she didn’t, Frank, it’s not a complicated question.’

  ‘She may have mentioned it.’

  ‘And you told Mark Barratt?’

  ‘I didn’t tell him. I merely mentioned that an employee had been difficult.’

  ‘Did you merely mention her home address in Clydebank?’

  ‘Look, I’m just a conduit—’

  Morrow got up and left before she gave her superiors cause to send her on another anger management course.

  Barratt’s lawyer was well briefed. He arrived at the station and immediately asked for the suitcase back. He put it in his car before he went to see his client in the interview room. They would not be allowed to question him. Barratt had been out of the country when Hettie was killed, when the fire killed two people, and they couldn’t prove a link to Roxanna. They had no cause to ho
ld him any longer.

  They watched from the office window as Barratt climbed into his lawyer’s silver Merc. The lawyer was smoking, sucking the smoke in so hard he looked as if he might swallow his own lips.

  43

  Morrow and McGrain pulled a couple of chairs away from the back row in the Victoria Hall. They sat next to the wall, in the shadow of the overhanging balcony. They weren’t there to participate in the public meeting. They were there to watch the crowd.

  The appeal for information was being filmed and would be shown on both the local news and a national TV crime show. A huge camera took up the centre of the room, facing the table on the stage. Banks of plastic chairs were arranged in front of it.

  The Sailors’ Rest fire was national news because of the tragic death of young Lea-Anne Ray. Helensburgh was appalled by her death, but none of the information the police received had been particularly useful. The feeling was that a lot of people knew but were too afraid to speak out.

  Morrow crossed her arms and looked around the familiar hall. She knew almost every corner of it from the plethora of photographs they had collected of the dinner dance. They were collating information on ‘Abigail Gomez’. The search would continue on both sides of the Atlantic but Morrow could already feel the energy ebbing from it. Police Scotland would get their slice of the proceeds from Injury Claims 4 U but they would forego a case clean-up. Gomez was a potentially costly collar and they couldn’t afford her. So far all they had turned up was a tentative identification: a dead woman by the name of Elizabeth Marquez. Gomez’s photos had been loosely matched by a US facial recognition programme. A Venezuelan ‘freelance security consultant’, Marquez had disappeared in Nigeria three years ago. She was presumed dead. They only had eight points of facial identification, not enough to action.

  The TV camera was bigger and boxier than Morrow would have expected. It was manned by slim people with suntans and haircuts too sharp for the small town.

  On stage a short table and four chairs had been laid out in front of a blue backdrop banner with the thistle and crown logo of Police Scotland: Keeping People Safe, it said.

  The burghers of the town began to filter in. A janitor pointed them to the seats and the TV people began to rearrange the audience like flowers in a vase. They placed the early arrivals in the front row and aisles, checking the composition in their monitors and going back to move them again.

  Morrow could see the monitor screen on the back of the camera, the boxy view of the room making the hall seem small and intimate. The view through the monitor was insistent. Her eye kept being drawn back to the bright little rectangle of ordered reality.

  Simmons arrived with Chief Inspector Pittoch who was wearing his full ceremonial uniform. They toured the hall together, smiling and shaking hands with the television people, with journalists. CI Pittoch gave a radio interview into a small dictaphone. Then someone from the TV came over and fitted the two of them with collar mics, sliding the wire down the back of their jackets and putting the transmitters into their pockets. All the while townspeople filtered in and were directed into their chairs.

  More chairs were brought in for more people. They were arriving all the time and the crowd began to creep towards Morrow and McGrain.

  A commotion near the door. Elderly members of the audience stood up, reverently watching two old women coming in. One was in a wheelchair, a bad leg straight out in front of her, two hands clutching the handle of her handbag like a steering wheel. The other old lady leaned heavily on the chair. Both of the women were dressed in their best, clean blouses, smart cardigans.

  At the side of the stage they were mic’d up and helped up the steep steps to the stage. The standing woman took it slowly and the seated woman was eased out of the chair by a couple of audience members. She made it up to the stage one shuffled step at a time. The wheelchair was folded, handed up, opened again and she sat down. She was wheeled behind the table and her companion sat down next to her. A man in the audience gave a couple of misplaced claps and was slapped on the arm for his trouble by the woman next to him.

  Still the town was arriving. The pensioners had come good and early, but now the rest of the town were streaming through the doors. Men in work clothes, women hurrying in as if they had just shed children in the car park, a woman with an NHS badge nodding to almost everybody.

  Three young men came in together, all wearing ‘Yes’ badges and carrying handfuls of referendum literature. A ripple of annoyance ran across the hall. They weren’t going to, were they? Not here, for goodness’ sake! But they weren’t. They sat down by the door, just canvassers on a break.

  Frank Delahunt arrived alone and was ignored by everyone. He sat down next to an elderly couple. They took his proffered hand and shook it but resented having to do so. He wasn’t liked and Morrow knew he had been told that he was losing his house. Police Scotland were going to auction it.

  Boyd Fraser came in, still wearing his chef whites. He must have come from next door. He’d been out of custody for four days but he looked shaken. His wife, Lucy, held his hand tightly, her jaw clenched, her attention on his every step. She was worried for him and he was grateful for her.

  The room stiffened suddenly. A momentary hush fell and everyone looked to the door. Mark Barratt was in the doorway. He stood with his chest out, taking the opprobrium full on. Morrow had to bite her cheek to stop herself from crying. It was the way he stood, arms out to the sides, fists balled, defiant. For a fleeting moment he had looked so much like Danny that she was afraid she would be sick.

  The moment passed, the chatter in the room rose again and Barratt walked into the body of the room. He wasn’t alone. The two younger men were dressed like Barratt, in dark tracksuits and they all had shaved heads. They looked like Barratt’s apostles. One of them had very heavy eyebrows.

  ‘That’s Tommy Farmer,’ muttered McGrain, and Morrow nodded.

  The trio walked around behind the camera, surveying the hall for seats. Tommy Farmer found three chairs together and stood by them, looking to Mark for approval, but the other guy had found a run of four seats and Mark nodded and headed over to him.

  Tommy looked puzzled. He stayed where he was and watched Barratt sit down and look up to the door. A woman was standing there. Barratt beckoned her over. They seemed an unlikely couple. She was messy, shuffling as she made her way over. Her ankles were swollen and she had a rip on the hem of her skirt. Her thin blonde hair was tangled at the back. She smiled and nodded at Barratt and sat down next to him.

  Tommy was agitated. He hurried over, looking at the woman, looking Barratt, moving quickly, looking for an explanation of something as he sat on the other side of his boss. Barratt blanked him but the woman made a point of giving Tommy a big grin. She looked like him. It was Tommy’s mother.

  The room was full. The doors were shut. The TV directors checked their monitors. The old women on the stage flattened their hair and collars and cardigans. Simmons and her boss moved to the wings of the stage, watching for a cue. Silence fell in the room.

  The director looked away from the monitor and gave the police a nod.

  CI Pittoch pulled his tunic straight with a firm tug at the hem, gave the audience a fleeting look of utter terror, walked to the table and sat down on the nearest chair. Simmons followed him on. She looked very comfortable. The press conference began.

  Pittoch welcomed them and said that the devastating fire at the Sailors’ Rest had been started deliberately. A local man, Murray Ray and his young daughter, well-loved in the local community, had died. Now: people knew who was responsible and this was the time to tell the truth. It was difficult sometimes, in such a close-knit community, to tell the truth but it was important.

  Pittoch introduced Mrs Eunice Ray, the lady in the wheelchair, and Annie Kilpatrick. They were Lea-Anne’s grandmothers and they wanted to read a statement.

  Annie and Eunice. Morrow hadn’t known their names. She hadn’t even mentioned Iain Fraser’s stilted last words
to Simmons because they made no sense. Tell them. It wasn’t me.

  The room was silent and still. Annie Kilpatrick kept her eyes down, trembling, as Eunice lifted her statement. The microphone was turned up so high to catch her faint voice that the room was filled with her breathing, the sound of her clothes brushing against each other. In the monitor screen Morrow saw that she was holding the paper too high, obscuring her face from view. She read in a high voice. Her only son and her granddaughter, their princess, had been murdered in this fire. People in the town knew who had started it. They had a duty to come forward and tell the police. Please tell—

  She stopped speaking. The paper in front of her face trembled. The room was so still, the mic so high, they could hear her tears drip on the paper.

  Eunice lowered the sheet, making herself visible again. She was weeping, looking at Annie sitting next to her. Annie was crying openly at the table, her chin on her chest. She whispered deep into the collar mic, ‘Our lives are over.’

  Everyone waited for her to speak again but she didn’t. Simmons looked to her boss. CI Pittoch hadn’t expected to be called upon to speak so soon. He was startled but took over:

  ‘So! We appeal. To anyone who knows anything. Come forward and help this family.’

  In his confusion he looked straight at Mark Barratt.

  Mark Barratt sat, unflinching, and looked back at him. Then he nodded, just a little.

  ‘No! Mark! No!’

  It was the woman next to him. She was on her feet, grabbing across Barratt, reaching for her son, Tommy.

  Barratt lifted an arm up and blocked her, took her shoulder and pushed her back into her seat.

  In the far corner of the hall a small man raised his hand, watching Barratt’s impassive face as he did. He was wearing a track suit too. He wanted to speak and Mark Barratt gave him a nod. ‘Tommy Farmer started the fire. I seen him.’

  A solitary shriek of a chair filled the room. Tommy was standing, looking at the door out.

  ‘Stay!’ Simmons was across the stage and down the steps. ‘Farmer! Stay there!’