by Val McDermid
Bel turned off the track on to a narrower rutted lane that wound up through a forest of oaks and chestnuts. After a mile or so, she emerged on a small plateau with an olive grove and a field of maize. At the far end was a tight cluster of houses beyond a hand-painted sign that read, Boscolata. Bel negotiated the sharp turns and carried on, back into the trees. As she rounded the second bend after Boscolata, she slowed and peered through the undergrowth at the ruined villa where this trail had started. There was nothing to show it was of any interest, other than a piece of red-and-white tape tied half-heartedly to the gate. So much for the Italian police investigation.
Another five minutes tortuous driving and Bel pulled into Grazia’s farmyard. A tan hound with droopy ears and a pink nose danced at the end of his chain, barking with all the bravado of a dog who knows nobody is going to come close enough to bite. Before Bel could open her door, Grazia appeared on the steps leading down from the loggia, wiping her hands on her apron, her face crinkling in a broad smile.
Extravagant greetings and the settling of Bel into the beautifully appointed studio took half an hour and had the advantage of helping Bel recover the rhythms of the language. Then the two women settled down with a cup of coffee in Grazia’s dim kitchen, the thick stone walls keeping the summer heat at bay as they had done for hundreds of years. ‘And now, you have to tell me why you are back so soon,’ Grazia said. ‘You said it was something to do with work?’
‘Sort of,’ Bel said, wrestling her Italian back into shape. ‘Tell me, have you noticed anything going on down at the ruined villa recently?’
Grazia gave her a suspicious look. ‘How do you know about that? The carabinieri were there on Friday. They took a look around, then they went to talk to the people in Boscolata. But what has this got to do with you?’
‘When we were here on holiday, I went exploring in the old villa. I found something there that connects to an unsolved crime back in England. A case from twenty years ago.’
‘What kind of crime?’ Grazia looked anxious. The swollen joints of her hands moved restlessly on the table.
‘A woman and her baby son were kidnapped. But something went wrong when the ransom was being handed over. The woman was killed and they never found out what happened to the child.’ Bel spread her hands and shrugged. Somehow, such gestures came more naturally when she was speaking Italian.
‘And you found something here connected to that?’
‘Yes. The kidnappers called themselves anarchists and they delivered their demands in the form of a poster. I found a poster just like it down at the villa.’
Grazia shook her head in amazement. ‘The world is getting smaller and smaller. So when did you go to the carabinieri?’
‘I didn’t. I didn’t think they’d believe me. Or if they did, they wouldn’t be interested in something that happened back in the UK twenty-odd years ago. I waited till I got home, then I went to the woman’s father. He’s a very rich man, a powerful man. The sort of person who makes things happen.’
Grazia gave a grim little laugh. ‘It would take a man like that to make the carabinieri get off their backsides and come all the way out here from Siena. That explains why they were so interested in who had been living in the villa.’
‘Yes. I thought it looked as if squatters had been living there.’
Grazia nodded. ‘The villa belonged to Paolo Totti. He died, maybe a dozen years ago. A silly man, very vain. He’d spent all his money buying a big house to impress everyone, but he didn’t have enough left over to look after the place like it deserved. And then he died without a will. His family have been fighting over the villa ever since. It drags on through the courts and every year the villa falls down a little bit more. Nobody from the family does anything to repair it in case they end up with nothing to show. They stopped coming near it years ago. So sometimes people move in for a while. They stay for summer then they go. The last lot, they stayed longer.’ Grazia finished her coffee and stood up. ‘All I know is gossip, but we’ll go down to Boscolata and talk to my friends there. They’ll tell you a damn sight more than they told those bossy carabinieri.’
Peterhead, Scotland
Karen studied James Lawson as he approached. No more ramrod bearing, head high and back straight. His shoulders were slumped, his steps small and tight. Three years in jail had put ten years on him. He lowered himself into the chair across the table from her, fidgeting and fussing till at last he settled. A small attempt at controlling some part of the interview, she thought.
Then he looked up. He still had the flat, hard cop stare, his eyes burning, his face stony. ‘Karen,’ he said, acknowledging her with a tiny nod. His lips, pale and bluish, compressed in a tight line.
She couldn’t see any point in small talk. There was nothing to be said that wouldn’t lead straight to recrimination and bitterness. ‘I need your help,’ she said.
Lawson’s mouth relaxed into a sneer. ‘Who do you think you are? Clarice Starling? You’d need to lose a few pounds before you could give Jodie Foster a run for her money.’
Karen reminded herself that Lawson had attended the same interrogation courses that she had. He knew all about probing for your opponent’s weaknesses. But then, so did she. ‘It might be worth going on a diet for Hannibal Lecter,’ she said. ‘But not for a disgraced cop that’s pulled his last trout out of Loch Leven.’
Lawson raised his eyebrows. ‘Did they send you on a smart-arse course before you took your inspector’s exam? If you’re supposed to be buttering me up, you’re not exactly going about it the right way.’
Karen gave a resigned shake of the head. ‘I haven’t got the time or the energy for this. I’m not here to flatter your ego. We both know how these things play out. You help me, your life inside these four walls gets a wee bit less horrible for a while. You walk away from me, who knows what shitty little stunt is going to make your life that wee bit more miserable? Up to you, Jimmy.’
‘It’s Mr Lawson to you.’
She shook her head. ‘That would imply more respect than you deserve. And you know it.’ Her point made, she’d refrain from calling him anything. She could hear him breathing hard through his nose, a faint wheeze at the end of each exhalation.
‘You think you could make my life any more miserable?’ He glared at her. ‘You have no bloody idea. They keep me in isolation because I’m an ex-cop. You’re the first visitor I’ve had this year. I’m too old and too ugly to interest anybody else. I don’t smoke and I don’t need any more phone cards.’ He gave a faint snort of laughter, phlegm bubbling in his throat. ‘How much worse do you think you can make it?’
She stared back at him, unflinching. She knew what he’d done and there was no place for pity or compassion in her heart for him. She didn’t care if they spat in his food. Or worse. He had betrayed her and everyone else who had worked with him. Most of the cops Karen knew were in the job for decent motives. They made sacrifices for the job, they cared that it was done properly. Discovering that a man whose orders they’d followed without flinching was a triple killer had shattered morale in the CID. The fractures were still healing. Some people still blamed Karen, arguing that it would have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. She didn’t know how they could sleep at night.
‘They tell me you use the library a lot,’ she said. His eyes flinched. She knew she had him. ‘It’s important to keep your mind active, isn’t it? Otherwise you really do go stir crazy. I hear you can download books and music on a wee MP3 player from the library these days. Listen any time you’ve a mind to.’
He looked away, folding and unfolding his fingers. ‘You still on cold cases?’ The concession of the words seemed to take energy he could ill spare.
‘It’s my department now. Robin Maclennan retired.’ Karen kept her voice neutral and her face impassive.
Lawson looked over her shoulder at the blank wall behind her. ‘I was a good cop. I didn’t leave many loose ends for you carrion crows to pick over,’ he said.
&nb
sp; Karen gave him a measured stare. He’d killed three people and tried to frame a vulnerable man for two murders, and yet he still thought of himself as a good cop. The capacity of criminals for self-delusion never ceased to amaze her. She wondered that he could sit there with a straight face after the laws he’d broken, the lies he’d told and the lives he’d shattered. ‘You cleared a lot of cases,’ was the best she could manage. ‘But I’ve got what looks like new evidence on one that’s still open.’
Lawson’s expression didn’t change, but she sensed a flicker of interest as he shifted slightly in his chair. ‘Catriona Maclennan Grant,’ he said, allowing himself a self-satisfied smirk. ‘For you to come yourself, it has to be murder. And that’s the only unsolved murder where I was SIO.’
‘Nothing wrong with your deductive skills,’ Karen said.
‘So, what? You finally got something to nail the bastard, after all this time?’
‘What bastard?’
‘The ex-boyfriend, of course…’ Lawson’s grey skin furrowed as he dredged his memory for details. ‘Fergus Sinclair. Gamekeeper. She’d given him the push, wouldn’t let him be a father to his kid.’
‘You think Fergus Sinclair kidnapped her and the baby? Why would he do that?’
‘To get his hands on his kid and enough money to keep the pair of them in high style,’ Lawson said, as if he were instructing a small child in the obvious. ‘Then he killed her during the handover so she couldn’t finger him. We all knew he’d done it, we just couldn’t prove it.’
Karen leaned forward. ‘There’s nothing about that in the file,’ she said.
‘Of course there isn’t.’ Lawson made a derisive noise in his throat. ‘Christ, Karen, do you think we were stupid back then?’
‘You didn’t have to disclose everything to the defence in 1985,’ she pointed out. ‘No operational reason why you shouldn’t have left a wee pointer for anyone coming after you.’
‘All the same, we didn’t put anything on paper that we couldn’t back up with solid evidence.’
‘Fair enough. But there’s nothing in the file to suggest you even looked at him. No interview notes or tapes, no statements. The only mention in the file is in a statement from Lady Grant saying she believed Sinclair was the father of Catriona’s son but that her daughter had always refused to confirm that.’
Lawson looked away. ‘Brodie Maclennan Grant’s a powerful man. We all agreed, right up to Chief Constable level. Nothing went in the file that we couldn’t back up a hundred and ten per cent.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Even though we thought Sinclair was the obvious suspect, we didn’t want to sign his death warrant.’
Karen’s mouth opened and closed. Her eyes widened. ‘You thought Brodie Grant would have Sinclair killed?’
‘You didn’t see the pain he was in after Cat died. I wouldn’t have put it past him.’ His mouth snapped shut and he glared at her defiantly.
She’d thought Brodie Grant was a harsh, driven man. But it had never crossed Karen’s mind to consider him a potential commissioner of death. ‘You were wrong about that,’ she said. ‘Sinclair was always safe. Grant doesn’t think he had it in him.’
Lawson snorted. ‘He might be saying that now. But at the time, you could feel the hatred coming off him for that lad.’
‘And you looked close at Sinclair?’
Lawson nodded. ‘He seemed promising. He had no alibi. He was working abroad. Austria, I think it was. Estate management, that’s his line.’ He frowned again, scratching his clean-shaven chin. He started speaking slowly, speeding up as memory took shape. ‘We sent a team over to talk to him. They didn’t find anything that let him off the hook. He’d been off work on holiday for the crucial time - kidnap, ransom notes, handover, getaway. And the guy we consulted at the art school said the poster was in the German Expressionist style, which kind of tied in with where he was living.’
He shrugged. ‘But Sinclair said he’d been on a skiing holiday. Moving from one resort to the next. Sleeping in his Land Rover to save money. He had ski-lift passes for all the relevant dates, paid for with cash. We couldn’t prove he hadn’t been where he said he’d been. More to the point, we couldn’t prove he was where we thought he was. It was the only real lead we had, and it took us nowhere.’
Monday 21st January 1985; Kirkcaldy
Lawson flicked through the folder again, as if he might find something he’d missed on his previous pass. It was still painfully thin. Without raising his head, he called across the office to DC Pete Rennie. ‘Has nothing come in from the crime scene lads yet?’
‘I just spoke to them. They’re working as fast as they can, but they’re not optimistic. They said it looks like they’re dealing with people who are smart enough not to leave traces.’ Rennie sounded both apologetic and anxious, as if he knew this was somehow going to be his fault.
‘Useless wankers,’ Lawson muttered. After the initial flash of excitement provoked by the second note from the kidnappers, it had been a day of mounting frustration. He’d had to accompany Grant to the bank, where they’d had a difficult meeting with a senior official who had mounted his high horse, announcing the bank had a policy of non-cooperation with kidnappers. And that was without either of them saying a word about the reason for Grant’s request. They’d ended up having to speak to a director of the bank before they’d made any headway.
Then Grant had taken him to some fancy gentleman’s club in Edinburgh and sat him down with a large whisky in spite of his protestations about being on duty. When the waiter put his drink in front of him, he ignored it and waited for Grant to say what was on his mind. This was one investigation where Lawson knew better than to appear to be in the driving seat.
‘I’ve got kidnap insurance, you know,’ Grant had said without preamble.
Lawson had wanted to ask how that worked, but he didn’t want to look like some provincial numpty who didn’t know what he was doing. ‘Have you spoken to them?’
‘Not so far.’ Grant swirled the malt round inside the crystal tumbler. The heavy phenolic smell of the whisky rose in a miasma that made Lawson feel faintly sick.
‘Can I ask why not?’
Grant took out a cigar and started the fiddly process of trimming and lighting. ‘You know how it is. They’ll want to come in mob-handed. The price of the ransom will be them running the show.’
‘Is that a problem?’ Lawson was feeling a little out of his depth. He took a sip of whisky and nearly spat it out. It tasted like the kind of cough medicine his grandmother had sworn by. It didn’t seem to belong to the same family as the dram of Famous Grouse he enjoyed by his own fireside.
‘I’m worried it will get out of hand. They’ve got two hostages. If they get so much as a sniff that we’ve set them up, who knows what they’re capable of?’ He lit the cigar and screwed up his eyes to peer at Lawson through the smoke. ‘What I need to know is whether you’re confident you can bring this to a successful conclusion. Do I need to take a chance on outsiders? Or can you get my daughter and grandson back to me?’
Lawson tasted the sweet, cloying smoke in his throat. ‘I believe I can,’ he said, wondering if his own career was about to go the same way as the cigar.
And that was how they’d left it. So here he was now, still at his desk while the evening crept inexorably towards night. Nothing was happening, except that his words seemed more and more foolhardy. He glared at Rennie. ‘Have you managed to track down Fergus Sinclair yet?’
Rennie’s shoulders hunched and he squirmed in his seat. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘I found out where he’s working and I spoke to his boss. But he’s not around. Sinclair, I mean. He’s away on holiday. Skiing, apparently. And nobody knows where.’
‘Skiing?’
‘He went off in his Land Rover with his skiing gear,’ Rennie said defensively, as if he’d personally packed up Sinclair’s stuff.
‘So he could be anywhere?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Including here? In Fife?’
‘There’s no evidence of that.’ Rennie’s mouth seemed to slip sideways, as if his jaw had just realized it was on thin ice.
‘Have you been on to the airlines? Airports? Channel ports? Have you made them go through their passenger lists?’
Rennie looked away. ‘I’ll get on to it right away.’
Lawson pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. ‘And get on to the Passport Office. I want to know if Fergus Sinclair has ever applied for a passport for his son.’
Monday 2nd July 2007; Peterhead
‘I was always convinced that Sinclair was involved somehow. It’s not as if there were that many people who knew her routine well enough to do the snatch,’ Lawson said, a touch of defensiveness in his voice now.
Karen felt perplexed. ‘But what about the baby? If he did all that to get his hands on his son, where’s Adam now?’
Lawson shrugged. ‘That’s your million-dollar question, isn’t it? Maybe Adam didn’t survive the shootout. Maybe Sinclair had some woman lined up to take care of the kid for him. If I was you, I’d take a look at his life now. See if there’s some lad in it the right age.’ He sat back, folding his hands in his lap. ‘So you’ve not come up with anything significant? This just a fishing expedition?’
She reached for the rolled-up poster she’d propped against her chair and slipped it free from its elastic band. She let it uncurl facing Lawson. He started to reach for it then stopped, giving her an interrogative look. ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘It’s a copy.’
Lawson carefully unfurled the paper. He studied the stark black-and-white artwork, running a finger over the puppeteer and his marionettes; the skeleton, Death and the goat. ‘That’s the poster the kidnappers used to communicate with Brodie Maclennan Grant.’ He pointed to the blank area at the bottom of the poster. ‘There, where you’d paste on the details of the show, that’s where the messages would be written.’ He gave her a look of resignation. ‘But you know all that already. Where did this come from?’