A Darker Domain

by Val McDermid

  She dumped everything on the dining table and went in search of a plate and cutlery. She still had some standards, for God’s sake. She tossed her coat over a chair and sat down to her meal, flipping a folder open and reading as she ate. She’d worked her way through the Grant case files earlier and made a note of the questions she wanted answers to. Now finally she had the chance to look over the material Phil had gathered for her.

  As she’d expected, the original missing-person report could hardly have been more sketchy. Back then, the disappearance of an unmarried, childless adult male with a history of clinical depression barely dented the police consciousness. It was nothing to do with the fact that the miners’ strike had stretched the force’s staffing levels almost to breaking point and everything to do with the fact that, back then, missing persons were not a priority. Not unless they were small children or attractive young women. Even these days, only the fact of Andy Kerr’s medical problems would have guaranteed him mild interest.

  He’d been reported missing by his sister Angie on Christmas Eve. He’d failed to show up at their parents’ home for the traditional family celebration. Angie, home from teacher training college for the holidays, had left a couple of messages on his answering machine in the previous week, trying to arrange meeting up for a drink. Andy hadn’t responded, but that wasn’t unusual. He’d always been dedicated to his job, but since the strike had begun, he’d become workaholic.

  Then on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Mrs Kerr had admitted that Andy was on sick leave for depression. Angie had persuaded her father to drive her over to Andy’s cottage in the Wemyss woods. The place had been cold and deserted, the fridge empty of fresh food. A note was propped up against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. Amazingly, it had been bagged and included in the file. If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you’re worried about me. Don’t be. I’ve had enough. It’s just one thing after another and I can’t take it any more. I’ve gone away to try and get my head straight. Andy.

  It wasn’t exactly a suicide note, but if you found a body near a message like that, you wouldn’t be expecting a murder victim. And the sister had said Andy liked to go mountain walking. She could see why the uniform who’d checked out the cottage and the surrounding woodland had recommended no further action aside from circulating the information to other forces in Scotland. A note on the file in a different hand noted that Angie Kerr had applied to have her brother declared dead in 1992 and the application had been granted.

  The last page was in Phil’s familiar writing. ‘The Kerr parents died in the Zeebrugge ferry disaster in 1987. Angie couldn’t claim their estate till she could have Andy declared dead. When she finally got probate in 1993, she sold up and emigrated to New Zealand. She teaches piano in Nelson on the South Island, works from home.’ Angie Kerr’s full address and phone number followed.

  She’d had a rough time of it, Karen thought. Losing her brother and both parents in the space of a couple of years was tough enough, without having to go through the process of having Andy formally declared dead. No wonder she’d wanted to move to the other side of the world. Where, she noted, it would now be half past eleven in the morning. A perfectly civilized time to call someone.

  One of the few things Karen had bought for her home was an answering machine that allowed her to make digital recordings of her phone calls, recordings which she could then transfer via a USB connection to her computer. She’d tried to persuade the Macaroon to acquire some for the office, but he’d seemed unimpressed. Probably because it hadn’t been his idea. Karen wouldn’t have minded betting something similar would turn up in the main CID office before long, the brainchild of ACC Lees himself. Never mind. At least she could use the system at home and reclaim the cost of the calls.

  A woman answered on the third ring, the Scots accent obvious even in the two syllables of, ‘Hello?’

  Karen introduced herself then said, ‘Is this Angie Kerr?’

  ‘Kerr as was. Mackenzie as is. Is this about my brother? Have you found him?’ She sounded excited, pleased almost.

  ‘I’m afraid not, no.’

  ‘He didn’t kill himself, you know. I’ve always thought he had an accident. Came off a mountain somewhere. No matter how depressed he was, Andy would never have killed himself. He wasn’t a coward.’ Defiance travelled well.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen said. ‘I really have no answers for you. But we are looking again at events around the time he went missing. We’re investigating the disappearance of Mick Prentice, and your brother’s name came up.’

  ‘Mick Prentice.’ Angie sounded disgusted. ‘Some friend he turned out to be.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s any coincidence that he went scabbing just before Andy took off.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  A short pause, then Angie said, ‘Because it would feel like the worst betrayal. Those guys had been friends since the first day at school. Mick becoming a scab would have broken Andy’s heart. And I think he saw it coming.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘The last time I saw him, he knew there was something going on with Mick.’

  Sunday 2nd December 1984; Wemyss Woods

  A visit home was never complete for Angie without time spent with her brother. She tried to get back at least once a term, but although the bus ride from Edinburgh was only an hour, it sometimes seemed too big an undertaking. She knew the problem was the different kind of distance that was growing between her and her parents as she moved more freely through a world that was alien to theirs: lectures, student societies, parties where drugs were as common as drink, and a conversational range that outstripped anything she’d ever encountered back in Fife. Not that there weren’t opportunities for broadening one’s intellectual horizons there. But the reading rooms and WEA courses and Burns Clubs were for the men. Women had never had the access or the time. The men did their shifts underground, then their time was their own. But the women’s work truly was never done, especially for those whose landlords were the old coal companies or the nationalized coal board. Angie’s own grandmother hadn’t had running hot water or a bath in her home until she’d been in her sixties. So the men didn’t easily take to women with an education.

  Andy was one of the exceptions. His move from the coal face to working for the union had exposed him to the wider equality policies pursued by the trade union movement. There might not be women working in the pits, but contact with other unions had persuaded Andy that the world would not end if you treated women as fellow members of the human race. And so brother and sister had grown closer, replacing their childhood squabbling with genuine debate. Now Angie looked forward to Sunday afternoons spent with her brother, tramping through the woods or nursing mugs of hot chocolate by the fire.

  That afternoon, Andy had met her off the bus at the end of the track that led deep into the woods to his cottage. They’d planned to skirt the woods and walk down to the shore, but the sky threatened rain so they opted to head back for the cottage. ‘I’ve got the fire on for you coming,’ Andy had said as they set off. ‘I feel guilty about having the money for the coal, so I don’t usually bother. I just put another jumper on.’

  ‘That’s daft. Nobody blames you for still getting a wage.’

  Andy shook his head. ‘That’s where you’re wrong. There’s plenty think we should be kicking back our wages into the union pot.’

  ‘And who does that help? You’re doing a job. You’re supporting the men on strike. You deserve to be paid.’ She linked her arm with his, understanding how embattled he felt.

  ‘Aye, and a lot of the strikers think they should be getting something from the union too. I’ve heard a few of them down the Welfare saying that if the union had been paying strike pay, they wouldn’t be having to work so hard to keep the funds out of the hands of the sequestrators. They wonder what the union funds are for, if not to support the members when there’s a strike on.’ He sighe
d, head down as if he was walking into a high wind. ‘And they’ve got a point, you know?’

  ‘I suppose so. But if you’ve willingly handed over the decision-making to your leaders, which they’ve done by agreeing to strike without a national ballot, then you can’t really start to complain when they make decisions you’re not so keen on.’ Angie looked closely at her brother, seeing how the lines of strain round his eyes had deepened since she’d last seen him. His skin looked waxy and unhealthy, like a man who has spent too long indoors without vitamin supplements. ‘And it doesn’t help anybody if you let them wind you up about it.’

  ‘I don’t feel like I’m much help to anybody right now,’ he said, so quietly it was almost lost in the scuffle of dead leaves beneath their feet.

  ‘That’s just silly,’ Angie protested, knowing it wasn’t enough but not knowing what else to say.

  ‘No, it’s the truth. The men I represent, their lives are falling apart. They’re losing their homes because they can’t pay the mortgage. Their wives have sold their wedding rings. Their kids go to school hungry. They’ve got holes in their shoes. It’s like a bloody Third World country here, only we don’t have charities raising money to help us with our disaster. And I can’t do anything about it. How do you think that makes me feel?’

  ‘Pretty shitty,’ Angie said, hugging his arm tighter to her. There was no resistance; it was like embracing the stuffed draught excluder their mother used to keep the living room as stifling as she could manage. ‘But you can only do the best you can. Nobody expects you to solve all the problems of the strike.’

  ‘I know,’ he sighed. ‘But I used to feel part of this community. I’ve belonged here all my life. These days, it feels like the guys on strike are on one side of the fence and everybody else is on the other side. Union officials, pit deputies, managers, fucking Tory government - we’re all the enemy.’

  ‘Now you’re really talking rubbish. There’s no way you’re on the same side as the Tories. Everybody knows that.’ They walked on in silence, quickening their pace as the promise of rain became a reality. It sheeted down in cold hard drops. The bare branches above their heads offered little protection against the penetrating downpour. Angie let go his arm and began to run. ‘Come on, I’ll race you,’ she said, exhilarated somehow by the drenching cold. She didn’t check to see whether he was following her. She just hurtled pell-mell through the trees, jinking and swerving to stay with the winding path. As always, emerging into the clearing where the cottage hunkered down seemed impossibly sudden. It sat there like something out of the Brothers Grimm, a low squat building with no charm except its isolation. The slate roof, grey harling, black door and window frames would have easily qualified it as the home of the wicked witch in the eyes of any passing child. A wooden lean-to sheltered a coal box, a wood pile and Andy’s motorbike and sidecar.

  Angie ran to the porch and turned round, panting. There was no sign of Andy. A couple of minutes passed before he trudged out of the trees, light brown hair plastered dark to his head. Angie felt deflated at the failure of her attempt to lighten his spirits. He said nothing as he led the way into the cottage, as neat and spartan as a barracks. The only decor ation was a series of wildlife posters that had been given away free with one of the Scottish Sunday papers. One set of shelves was crammed with books on natural history and politics; another with LPs. It couldn’t have been less like the rooms she frequented in Edinburgh, but Angie liked it better than any of them. She shook her head like a dog to shed the raindrops from her dark blonde hair, tossed her coat over a chair and curled up in one of the second-hand armchairs that flanked the fire. Andy went straight through to the scullery to make the hot chocolate.

  As she waited for him to come through, Angie fretted over how she might lift his mood. Usually she made him laugh with tales of her fellow students and their antics, but she sensed that wasn’t going to work today. It would feel too much like insensitive tales of the over-privileged. Maybe the answer was to remind him of the people who still believed in him.

  He came back with two steaming mugs on a tray. Usually they had biscuits, but clearly anything that smacked of luxury was off the menu today. ‘I’ve been giving most of my wages to the hardship fund,’ he said, noticing her noticing. ‘Just keeping enough for the rent and the basics.’

  They sat facing each other, nursing their hot drinks to let the warmth seep back into their cold hands. Angie spoke first. ‘You shouldn’t pay attention to them. The people who really know you don’t think you’re one of the enemy. You should listen to people like Mick who know who you are. What you are.’

  ‘You think?’ His mouth twisted in a bitter expression. ‘How can the likes of Mick know who I am when I don’t know who they are any more?’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know who Mick is any more? The two of you have been best pals for twenty odd years. I don’t believe the strike has changed either of you that much.’

  ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ Andy stared into the fire, his eyes dull and his shoulders sagging. ‘Men round here, we’re not supposed to talk about our feelings. We live in this atmosphere of comradeship and loyalty and mutual dependence, but we never talk about what’s going on inside us. But me and Mick, we weren’t like that. We used to tell each other everything. There was nothing we couldn’t talk about.’ He pushed his damp hair back from his high narrow forehead. ‘But lately something’s changed. I feel like he’s holding back. Like there’s something really important that he can’t bring himself to talk about.’

  ‘But that could be anything,’ Angie said. ‘Something between him and Jenny, maybe. Something it wouldn’t be right to talk to you about.’

  Andy snorted. ‘You think he doesn’t talk about Jenny? I know all about that marriage, trust me. I could draw you a map of the fault lines between that pair. No, it’s not Jenny. The only thing I can think is that he agrees with the rest of them. That I’m neither use nor ornament to them right now.’

  ‘You sure you’re not imagining things? It doesn’t sound like Mick.’

  ‘I wish I was. But I’m not. Even my best pal thinks I’m not fit to be trusted any more. I just don’t know how long I can go on doing my work, feeling like this.’

  Now Angie was starting to feel genuinely worried. Andy’s despair was clearly far beyond anything she knew how to deal with. ‘Andy, don’t take me wrong, but you need to go and see the doctor.’

  He made a noise like a laugh strangled at birth. ‘What? Aspirin and Disprin, the painkilling twins? You think I’m losing my marbles? You think that pair would know what to do about it if I was? You think I need temazepam like half the bloody women round here? Happy pills to make it not matter?’

  ‘I want to help you, Andy. And I don’t have the skills. You need to talk to somebody that knows what they’re doing, and the doctor’s a good place to start. Even Aspirin and Disprin know more than I do about depression. I think you’re depressed, Andy. Like, clinically depressed, not just miserable.’

  He looked as if he was going to cry. ‘You know the worst thing about what you just said? I think you might be right.’

  Thursday 28th June 2007; Kirkcaldy

  It sounded plausible. Andy Kerr had sensed Mick Prentice was keeping something from him. When it appeared Mick had joined the scabs and gone to Nottingham, it might have been enough to push someone in a fragile state over the edge. But it looked as if Mick Prentice hadn’t gone to Nottingham at all. The question, Karen thought, was whether Andy Kerr knew what had really happened to his best friend. And whether he was involved in his disappearance. ‘And you never spoke to Andy after that Sunday?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I tried to ring him a couple of times, but I just got the answering machine. And I didn’t have a phone where I was living so he couldn’t call me back. Mum told me the doctor had signed him off his work with depression, but that was all I knew.’

  ‘Do you think it’s possible he and Mick went off somewhere together?’

&nbs
p; ‘What? You mean, just turned their back on everybody and waltzed off into the sunset like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?’

  Karen winced. ‘Not that, exactly. More like they’d both had enough and couldn’t see any other way out. No question that Andy was having his problems. And you suggested Mick and Jenny weren’t getting along too well. Maybe they just decided on a clean break?’

  She could hear Angie breathing on the other side of the world. ‘Andy wouldn’t do that to us. He would never have hurt us like that.’

  ‘Could Mick have talked him into it? You said they’d been pals since school. Who was the leader? Who was the follower? There’s always one who leads and one who follows. You know that, Angie. Was Mick the leader?’ No one pushed more gently but firmly than Karen on a roll.

  ‘I suppose so. Mick was the extrovert, Andy was much quieter. But they were a team. They were always in trouble, but not in a bad way. Not with the police. Just always in trouble at school. They’d booby-trap chemistry experiments with fireworks. Glue teachers’ desks shut. Andy was good with words and Mick was artistic, so they’d print up posters with fake school announcements. Or Mick would forge notes from teachers letting the pair of them off classes they didn’t like. Or they’d mess about in the library, swapping the dust jackets on the books. I’d have had a breakdown if I’d ever had pupils like them. But they grew out of it. By the time of the strike, they’d both settled down into their lives.’ There was more than a hint of regret in her voice. ‘So yes, theoretically Mick might have talked Andy into doing a runner. But it wouldn’t have lasted. They’d have come back. They couldn’t stay away. Their roots were too deep.’

  ‘You tore yours up,’ Karen observed.

  ‘I fell in love with a New Zealander, and all my family were dead,’ Angie said flatly. ‘I wasn’t leaving anybody behind to grieve.’