The speaker was DS Ranald Sharpe, a small, bandy-legged Renfrewshire man seconded from Gayfield Square, who had, Alice knew, applied for the post she had secured. On sight they had disliked each other, and the difference in their respective accents further alienated them from each other. Sharpe identified hers with his view of Edinburgh and its faults: middle-classness, ostensible respectability, a missing heart. She equated his with her perception of Glasgow’s worst traits: loudness, an aggressive couthiness and shallow, emotional lability.
‘Anything on the CCTV?’ she asked him.
‘Nothing useful has shown up so far, not for the period we’re working on.’
‘Speak to the Forth Ports Authority, would you? They’re based near Rosyth, Port of Rosyth, near the Consortium’s headquarters. Or maybe the Leith harbour master? Thinking about it, he might be a better bet, he might be the man for the job. See if any of them can help at all in pinpointing where she was put in the water. After all, we know where she ended up and, roughly, how long she was in there for. Dr McCrae estimated twenty-four hours at the very most, Helen Cash agreed. See what, if anything, they can give us, eh?’
‘Right. Boss.’
From his mouth, to her ears at least, the epithet had a mocking ring.
‘I spoke to Farrar from the Evening News,’ DC Trish Rennie chipped in, a half-eaten apple in her hand. ‘Gave him a few titbits, like you said. They’re going to do a wee piece, and they’ll include the usual stuff about “anyone with any information. Blah, blah”.’
‘Good. Pick up any post from her flat, OK, and get the rest intercepted and sent straight here, please. Check the flat, though, for the first few days – sometimes there’s a bit of a delay with the system. At the same time you could see if that neighbour, holidaying in France, is back.’
‘Don’t bother about that today. She’s not,’ DS Sharpe said, arms crossed. ‘I got her house number from Mrs Anderson, rang it this morning and there was no answer.’
‘Nothing to be lost in checking it again anyway, Trish,’ Alice replied, rising from the desk she had been sitting on, signalling that they should all be on their way, make a start. The annoying little git, countermanding her orders like that.
‘One other thing,’ DS Sharpe said, also getting to his feet and finding himself, to his surprise, looking up at her, ‘I’ve got the fingerprint results. Apart from the deceased they found the prints of three other individuals. Unfortunately, none of them are on the database.’
‘That was quick,’ Alice said, taken aback, ‘I thought we’d have a couple more days to wait, at least. How on earth did you swing that?’
‘I’ve got friends,’ he said, winking at her, ‘in high places an’ all.’
‘And the DNA results?’
‘Not that high . . .’
The cleaner, a pale weasel of a man, answered the door at the flat in Raeburn Place, Stockbridge. Instantly, Adele’s rich tones floated out of the open door, filling the common stair. Reluctantly, he led the two policewomen into the hall, past his scuffed trainers on the doormat, and then, a little sheepishly, told them to wait while he went to turn the television off. The warm atmosphere inside was scented by a trio of sweet, throat-catching scents: floor-polish, unwashed feet and the fumes given off by an overheated hoover shortly before the motor fails.
‘I wasn’t watching it or anything,’ he remarked, unnecessarily, on his return.
‘We’re looking for Mr Evans, Hamish Evans,’ Alice said.
‘Aren’t we all!’ he replied, looking discontented, ‘Join the club! As usual, he’s not left my money out for me. He remembers without fail to buy the cleaning stuff, but my money? Forget it!’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘I don’t see him. Well, hardly ever. He leaves notes for me, telling me what to do, like. Lists. Didn’t even bother to do that this time. And the place is a tip today. Drawers out, stuff all over the bedroom floor. I’m not supposed to tidy, just to clean. The boy needs someone here every day to pick things up, do his washing up. But I only come once a week and he leaves it all for me. The kitchen’s not been touched, all his supper things, all his breakfast things left for me to deal with. He’s an animal. He’s a mink.’
‘Is it unusually messy?’
‘No – why?’
‘So when did you last see him?’
‘Sometime last month. He came back while I was still here.’
‘Is something burning?’ DC Cairns said, sniffing the air loudly.
‘Shit!’ the man exclaimed, turning on the spot and racing into the galley kitchen. He returned less than a minute later, a crumpled dishcloth over one thin shoulder.
‘My breakfast sausage roll,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘Cinders.’
‘Where does Mr Evans work?’ Alice asked.
‘At a solicitor’s office in Howe Street – McPhees, I think it’s called.’
He giggled, and when they did not join in, he added weakly, ‘McPhees, get it! They’re lawyers! I only just thought of that. He’s not a solicitor or anything, he just helps out in the property shop, shows folk round, that kind of thing. He’s not qualified.’
On the wall opposite them was a photograph of a young man, tanned and smiling, with a pair of skis over his shoulder.
‘Is that him?’ Alice asked.
‘Hamish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aye.’
‘Can we borrow it?’
‘Help yourselves, you’re the police, aren’t youse?’
Noticing a thin stream of water working its way along the floor of the narrow hallway, DC Cairns tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to it.
‘Oh God, that’s all I need, that’s the bath overflowing now!’ he shouted, dashing towards the bathroom.
‘Jesus!’ he said, breathless on his return. ‘I just had the tap on, cleaning it and everything. I didn’t realise the plug was still in. You’ll have to go, the pair of you, I can’t do everything myself when you’re around. I’ve a job to do.’
He raised his left foot, inspecting the sole through a hole in his grey sock and muttering crossly, ‘Now I’ve got a skelf off the floorboards . . .’
‘One final thing,’ Alice said. ‘Did he have a girlfriend?’
‘Him?’
‘Yes,’ she said patiently, ‘him.’
‘Maybe, must have. I found a pair of panties recently and they weren’t his. Far too small for that. Scanty, if you know what I mean.’
‘Could you describe her?’ DC Cairns asked, pushing her gold-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of her nose.
‘Aye. A size 10. I never seen her, just her panties.’
The conversation between the police inspector and the manager of the property shop, a Mr Penny, was short and to the point. Hamish Evans had not turned up for work that week, although he had been expected from Tuesday onwards. Prior to that he had been in London for a week, seeing a sick relative, and the firm had sanctioned that absence. They had left phone messages for him three times, but had received no response. Looking affronted at the question, Mr Penny told them that he had no idea whether the lad had a girlfriend or not. He suggested that they speak instead to Lorna, the ‘wee girl’ in the front office. She, a trim, petite figure with a black bob and long, highly manicured nails, blushed continuously as she spoke, confiding that he did have a girlfriend, a new one. One called Mandy.
‘It’s him,’ DC Cairns said gleefully as soon as they were both back in the car. ‘It all makes sense, give or take. He’d have time to get back from London, have a lover’s tiff – maybe they even had the tiff on the phone.’
‘Don’t you think that’s a bit premature?’ Alice answered, checking her mirror before joining the traffic, and signalling to turn left onto George Street.
‘Well, he is missing, isn’t he? Why else would he go missing? He seems respectable, has a cleaner, works in a property shop, he’s not exactly a vagrant. And why didn’t he report her as missing? She was missing, after all, sh
e didn’t turn up for work.’
‘Maybe he didn’t know, maybe they weren’t due to meet. This was a new relationship. Maybe they hadn’t arranged anything until the weekend or something.’
‘But she wouldn’t be answering her phone either. They’d be bound to be phoning each other, surely! Texting, Facebooking or whatever. Tweeting even. He’d leave messages. No, he’s done a bunk . . .’
‘But she’d no apps, no computer, remember? Maybe they’d had a row?’
‘Exactly!’
As Alice tried to remember what new, young love was like, the excitable constable continued talking, arguing with herself as well as her superior, picturing the whole thing and concluding, satisfied, ‘It’s always their nearest and dearest, isn’t it? That’s the rule.’
‘You get out here. Find out,’ Alice said, turning the car into the pound at St Leonard’s Street, coming to a halt but keeping the engine running ‘whether he caught a flight back from London. Get the time of all the evening flights. We know they spoke on Monday night. Speak to our people at Edinburgh Airport, get them to check BA, easyJet, Flybe, Virgin . . . whoever they are, all the airlines who run flights between London and Edinburgh, the whole lot. Better check the trains too, he might have used them for all we know. Oh, and check if he had a car, and if he did, find it. Make sure everyone’s on the lookout for it.’
‘Where are you going?’ the constable asked, keeping a hand on the open door, awaiting an answer.
‘Me? I’m off to see Irene and find out a bit more about our deceased, Miranda – Mandy Stimms. I’ve got no picture of her, of her character, what she was like, what to expect. At the moment, all we have is a dead, twenty-one-year-old, pregnant lesbian with a boyfriend, who worked in a Co-op shop and liked red Leicester cheese. Oh, and who probably wore size 10 underwear and had a cat.’
‘Seventeen. She was actually seventeen.’
‘What makes you think that? That’s not what the manager said. He told us that she was twenty-one.’
‘Yes, but her mother says that she’s seventeen and she ought to know. The girl probably lied about her age because of the minimum wage thing. Who can blame her? They get a pittance, it’s like slave labour . . .’
‘That’s possible. He said that she hadn’t handed in her birth certificate, maybe that was why she didn’t.’
‘Who is Irene?’
‘Her best friend in the Co-op, the one the manager mentioned.’
To the inspector’s surprise Irene was not a fellow teenager, someone with whom Miranda Stimms could laugh and giggle, go clubbing and compare notes about boyfriends, Instagram, Primark and TK Maxx. Instead, she could have been the girl’s granny, or possibly even her great-granny. She had a benign, matriarchal aura about her, and radiated a quiet but unmistakable authority. In appearance, she resembled an elderly chimpanzee, with small, deep-set brown eyes, an oddly pronounced upper jaw with a faint black moustache and a receding chin. Due to her pigeon-toes, she waddled when she walked, elbowing herself from side to side as if setting out on a long trek.
‘I knew you were coming,’ she said, on meeting Alice, ‘Mr Wilson told me about Mandy. He says we’re to use his office. I’m to take my lunch break in there.’
Once she was settled in her seat, her meal of an egg roll and a flask of soup in front of her, she looked at the policewoman as if to let her know that the interview could now start.
‘Could you tell me a bit about Miranda, what she was like, and so on?’
‘I could,’ she said, taking her time, removing the aluminium foil from around her roll. ‘A great lassie, I thought. She was a real worker, unlike some of them they take on, she never stopped. When she first came and we were unloading bakery goods together, I had to tell her to slow down. “Slow down, hen!” I says, “for pity’s sake!” You have to take your time, you see, otherwise you’ll not manage the whole shift, you’ll get tired out too soon. Others’ll get sacked, an’ all. I got her the job in the first place.’ She paused.
‘How did you meet her?’
‘Em . . .’ she hesitated, thinking, ‘at the bus stop. The bus was late, we got talking. I was going to my work, told her they were looking for staff. She jumped at it. Now, let me get a bite, eh?’
After she had swallowed a couple of mouthfuls and dabbed the ends of her lips carefully with a paper hankie, she nodded, signalling her readiness to continue.
‘Did she make other friends in the shop, among the younger ones?’
‘Not really. She was funny that way. It’s hard to describe. I never met anyone like her, like her in that way, before. I think a lot of the young ones scared her.’ She took another bite. Flour from the roll cascaded onto the surface of the desk, then was efficiently wiped up by her with another hankie.
‘Did they bully her or something?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s just she wasn’t like them. Sometimes I don’t think she understood what they were on about. You know about the TV programmes and suchlike. That Facebook, YouTube, computer dating, that texting they all do all the time, chat-rooms or whatever they’re called. I don’t have a clue myself, half the time.’
‘Was she slow – I mean, mentally slow?’
‘No. She learnt everything in the job easily, really quickly. You only had to tell her once where things were supposed to go, where to put things. She picked up the till, just like that. Mr Wilson thought she was the bee’s knees.’
‘Old-fashioned, then?’
‘Yes,’ she said, starting to unscrew the stopper of her flask, ‘that’s what Jocky, my man, said when she came for her tea. He said she was more like us, you understand – out of touch, past it, you might say.’
‘Did she have a boyfriend?’ Alice asked. Unconsciously, her eyes were now fixed on the woman’s tomato soup as it steamed in the plastic cup of the flask.
‘You want some, hen?’ she asked. ‘I could see if I can get another cup. There’ll be some where we have our tea-break.’
‘No, but thanks. I’ll get my lunch later, back at the station.’
‘Be sure you do, then. A boyfriend? Yes, she did. She was that excited, told me all about him, couldn’t stop herself from talking about him. Fell for him, like that . . . like a duck to water. I seen him, once, just the once, nice-looking laddie and all, well-dressed. She loved him to bits. Besotted, she was.’
‘What was his name?’
‘I cannae mind,’ she replied, then, smiling, obviously pleased at her recall, she corrected herself, ‘Aye, I can. Sammy. No, silly, silly me – Hamish – that was it. A plain name, Scottish. That’s it. I thought at the time, a good old-fashioned name, just like my man’s. Sammy was the first one. But Hamish took her off Sammy.’
‘Sorry, who was Sammy? What’s his full name?’
‘Sam Inglis. Just after she started at the shop he was after her. He’s a big, fat fellow. I don’t like him. He’s after them all, all the young ones, the lassies, every time a new one comes. I reckon he’s only got one thing on his mind. He’s always making jokes, filthy ones, but they don’t make me laugh. Miranda wasn’t like that – she was . . . proper. Yes, that’s how I’d describe her, proper. He didn’t like it when she threw him over, but he had it coming. Hamish was much more her style.’
‘Finally, and it’s an odd question to ask, I appreciate, but . . . as far as you know, she wasn’t a lesbian?’
‘A what?’
‘A lesbian?’
‘Och, away with you!’ the woman said, startled at the very suggestion. ‘I’ve just been telling you about her boyfriend, about Hamish, have I not? Whatever gave you that idea? She was proper, old-fashioned, I told you. Not like that, not at all.’
He sat outside the house in his Mazda, unwilling, despite the cold, to go in. Huge raindrops hammered on the roof, pouring down the windscreen in a never-ending flood and blurring the headlights of the oncoming cars. A light was still on in the kitchen and through the rivulets he could just make out a figure, seated, slumped forward again
st the window. It must be her. His eyes felt hot and gritty, an ache behind them somewhere deep inside his brain, and he rubbed them in the vain hope that it would ease. He ought, he knew, to go in and try and comfort her, but he could not face it. He no longer had the energy. The ineffable weight, the blackness of her despair would pull him under too, disorientate him, drown him, and he had to be strong. He had to be strong enough for both of them, Lambie and him, strong enough for everyone. Otherwise they would never get back up, up to the surface, back into the light and the air.
She would have got the message by now, but there had not been space enough on the answering machine to say what he needed to say, what she needed to hear. Why hadn’t she been at home? Where on earth had she been? Panicking as always at the very sound of the strange recorded voice, he had had to gabble away like a madman, ‘Lambie, it’s me. She wasn’t there, not at that school. The Ardtean one, from my list. But don’t you worry about a thing, I’ve another to try tomorrow, OK? Now I’ve got to go. I’m off to Aberdeen for a meeting. See you tonight, late, maybe very late; I’ve got to see a few of our people on the way down, one in Brechin, one in Kelty . . .’
That had been it, all that there was room for. But he knew what its effect would have been, that amongst all the tears and snuffles, there would be wailing, then body-racking, soul-tearing sobbing. And more. Like the last time. And the time before that. But, by the look of her, she had had a support this time, one offering sweet, silent succour, one with many names in both English and Gaelic. In his absence that was the one, the only one, which could take his place.
As he opened the kitchen door, she did not stir. Her head was down, resting on the table top. Seeing her there, mouth open, face distorted, flattened against the wood, he had a sudden terrible thought. She’d done it, this time she’d actually done it. She had killed herself. But as he ran towards her, crying out her name in his terror, he caught sight of the half-empty whisky bottle by her head and felt, first relief, and then waves of hot, scalding shame. Because, seeing the Famous Grouse label he had been pleased for a second, knowing it would have done the trick, done the job for him. Gently, taking care not to wake her, he fetched the rug from the chest, placed it over her and then, exhausted after fourteen hours on the move, went up the steep stairs to his bed. She was past comforting by him.
Troubled Waters Page 8