by Val McDermid
‘What do you think?’
‘I think you don’t usually make jokes about things like that. But what happened?’
Karen told him. He listened in silence, then let out a long shrill whistle. ‘That sucks,’ he said. ‘How did they know where you were?’
‘That’s a good question. Either somebody was following me because they don’t like the questions I’m asking or else they were staking out the cottage and they didn’t like the idea that I’d been inside.’
‘Or maybe . . . ’ Jason trailed off, giving her a quick uncertain glance.
‘Maybe what?’
‘Maybe it was pure chance that they turned up at the same time as you. Maybe they were looking for the same thing you found. And they just freaked out when they saw you?’
‘You’re right,’ Karen said. The boy was learning, no doubt about it. ‘Whatever, it’s clear that there’s something going on.’
‘Right enough, maybe you’re on to something. So what are we going to do about it?’
‘We’re going to solve it.’ What else? If someone was after her, dragging the truth into the open was the best way to defuse it. ‘We’ll pick up the plane crash evidence on the way home. But right now, I want your mind on Darren Foreman,’ she said. ‘Glasgow Airport, next exit.’
Darren Foreman’s boss was a taciturn Highlander with a soft voice that belied his tough appearance. He had a face as expressive as the north face of the Buachaille and almost as craggy. He took them to a tiny interview room behind the airport’s security area and left them alone. ‘I’ll get Darren,’ he said.
The only decoration was a Home Office poster showing all the objects a traveller was no longer permitted to take on board a plane. The room smelled of synthetic lemon and, beneath that, the musky darkness of body odour. Karen tried to get comfortable on the plastic chair, but it was a big ask. Her shoulder nagged at her to find a better place to sit.
They didn’t have long to wait. The door opened on a man of medium height made burly by his body armour and equipment. He carried a Heckler and Koch semi-automatic at port arms as he looked them up and down. What hair showed beneath his forage cap was as dark as Ross Garvie’s. It was tempting to conjure a resemblance, but Karen couldn’t put hand on heart and swear they looked alike. Foreman was eyeing her with shrewd blue eyes, weighing her up as one would a dangerous opponent.
His boss appeared at his shoulder and said, ‘Darren, I’ll take the piece.’
Foreman said nothing, merely lifting the gun over his head to free the strap and handing it to him. The sergeant left, taking the gun with him and shutting the door after himself.
‘Please, sit down, Constable Foreman,’ Karen said. As he settled into the chair opposite her, legs spread apart, hands on knees, she introduced herself and Jason.
‘I don’t understand,’ Foreman said. ‘What’s Historic Cases got to do with me?’
‘We’d like to interview you under caution,’ Karen said. She nodded to Jason, who recited the familiar words.
Darren Foreman pushed his chair back a few feet. His eyes narrowed. ‘You better tell me what this is about or I’m out of here.’
‘That wouldn’t be a wise move,’ Karen said. ‘How do you think that would look to your boss? Refusing to cooperate with Police Scotland official business? I’d guess you wouldn’t have your pretty wee machine gun very long in those circumstances. Look, Darren, the best thing for everybody is if you just relax and answer my questions.’
He folded his arms across his chest. ‘I might answer or I might not.’
‘Do you know or have you ever known a woman called Jeanette MacBride?’
Puzzled but wary, Foreman straightened in his chair. ‘I used to go out with a Jeanette MacBride.’
‘Can you tell us when that was?’
His eyes moved up and to the side. ‘It must have been seventeen, eighteen years ago. I was in the army then. You could check with my records. It finished because my unit was mobilised and stationed in Berlin.’
‘Are you sure that’s why it finished?’
He shifted in his seat. ‘Why else?’
‘Nothing to do with her telling you she was pregnant by you?’
Foreman clenched his fists, tucking them into his armpits. ‘I was shipping out to Berlin. I told her it was over between us and she should get an abortion because I wasn’t about to become a daddy. I was young and stupid in those days, Chief Inspector.’
‘Did she tell you she had the child?’
‘I never opened her letters, I binned them. Like I said, I wasn’t ready to have kids. It took me another five years to make my mind up about that.’
‘So you were unaware that Jeanette had a son?’
He shook his head.
‘And that she put him up for adoption?’
Again, the head-shake. ‘Look, I’ve got two daughters of my own now. I don’t feel any connection to some teenage lad I’ve never seen. The man and woman that brought him up, that’s his parents as far as I’m concerned.’
‘Fair enough. I think they’d agree with you.’
‘So what am I doing here?’
‘Constable Foreman, where were you on May seventeenth, 1996?’
‘What?’ He looked and sounded bamboozled.
‘It’s a straightforward question. May seventeenth, 1996.’
‘You mean, specifically where was I, or more generally?’ He leaned forward, gripping his knees with his hands. ‘Because I have no fucking idea what specifically I was doing that night or where I was doing it. But here’s what I can tell you. That night, same as every other night in April, May, June and half of July in 1996, I was in Gun Club Hill Barracks in Hong Kong.’
48
Jason broke the long silence that followed Foreman’s words. ‘Can you prove that?’ he asked.
‘It’s not my job to prove it, it’s yours. You can check with army records. That’ll answer your question about where I was that night. Why the hell are you asking me about that night anyway?’
Karen had gathered herself together now. ‘A young woman called Tina McDonald was raped and murdered in a Glasgow back alley. Her killer left his DNA at the scene. For reasons that I imagine you have no interest in, given what you just said, we recently took a DNA sample from your biological son. We got a familial hit on the DNA database. I take it you know what that means?’
Foreman’s eyes widened. ‘A close male relative. And you thought it must be me?’ His voice was tinged with outrage.
‘You can’t blame us for that,’ Karen said. Until she had checked with army records, she wouldn’t give up Darren Foreman as a suspect. But it would be useful to let him think she had. If only to get his DNA without further complications. ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if I hadn’t chased you down. Are you willing to give us a DNA sample so that we can conclusively eliminate you from our inquiries? I mean, you know it wasn’t you, so you have nothing to lose.’ She gave him her best smile.
‘Is he in trouble, this lad of Jeanette’s?’
‘I won’t lie to you. He’s in a bad place right now. But there’s nothing you can do to help him, I promise you that. So, Darren. The DNA?’
He blew his breath out in an explosive puff. ‘All right,’ he said. He knew the drill. He must have seen it often enough, Karen thought. Jason handed him the long cotton-tipped swab and Foreman rubbed it vigorously round the inside of both cheeks before dropping it into the proffered tube. Jason sealed it and wrote the details on the label – place, time, date, name of the donor, name of the officer taking the sample.
‘Do you have any other sons?’ Karen asked.
Foreman’s lip curled in a sneer. ‘What do you take me for? Look, I got a shock with Jeanette. After that, I was careful. I always used a condom. Until I got married, obviously. I didn’t want another nasty surprise.’ Then a thought clearl
y crossed his mind. He rolled his muscular shoulders and said softly, ‘What the hell.’ He sighed. ‘If you’re looking at close male relatives of my biological son, you should know that I have a brother. Well, I should say I had a brother. He died about eighteen months ago. A stupid accident on the building site where he was working.’
Karen felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. ‘Do you know where he was in 1996?’
He shook his head. ‘We weren’t close. Chalk and cheese, me and Gary. One of the reasons I went into the army was that I didn’t want to end up like him. He was three years older than me, feckless and aimless.’
‘Is there anyone you can think of who would know where he was and what he was doing back then?’
Foreman nodded. ‘My mother. He was the apple of her eye. It didn’t matter what Gary did, it was never his fault. The world was always down on him, according to her.’ The bitterness in his voice was corrosive. ‘She’ll be able to give you chapter and verse.’
‘Thank you. And where will I find your mum?’
‘Linlithgow: 39 Strathmore Court.’
Jason scribbled furiously. ‘Will she be in just now?’
Foreman shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. Look, she doesn’t keep very well. If you hold off till tomorrow morning, I’ll get hold of her and make sure she’s ready to see you. It’ll give her a chance to tap into her memories and give you the help you need.’ He stared at the floor. ‘If he hadn’t been my brother, I’d never have given him the time of day. But I can’t believe he would commit rape and murder.’
‘If he didn’t, we won’t pin it on him for the sake of getting a conviction,’ Karen said. ‘I promise you that.’
‘And if he did, he got away with it, which means my mum was spared twenty years of shame. I can’t say I’m sorry about that.’ Foreman straightened up. ‘Are we done here? Only we need to be on patrol and my partner can’t do anything while I’m here with you.’
Karen gestured towards the door. ‘You’re free to go. Thanks for your help.’
They watched him go, then Karen said, ‘Away and find his boss and tell him we want to know if Foreman does anything out of character. Till we get that DNA result back, I’m not taking anything on trust.’
The journey back across the narrow waist of the Central Belt seemed to take for ever. Roadworks, the ever-expanding rush hour, the detour via the lab at Gartcosh to drop off the DNA sample and finally the run out to the evidence store to collect six cardboard archive boxes of files from the store. ‘That’s the digest,’ the helpful warehouse clerk volunteered. ‘There’s a whole stack of the original unedited witness statements, but I thought you’d be able to make a start with these. If you need more, we can always dig it out for you. No bother.’
By the time they got back to base and Jason had loaded the files into their office to spare her shoulder, he was starting to look frayed round the edges. ‘Away home,’ Karen told him. ‘We’ll be off to Linlithgow in the morning, so make sure you get here in good time.’
Jason eyed the archive boxes dubiously. ‘Are you going to make a start on them tonight?’
‘I was considering it.’
‘It’s not my place, boss, but I think you should maybe take an early bath. After last night, I mean. You look kind of rough. Tired,’ he hastily corrected himself, seeing the look on her face. ‘Most folk wouldn’t have come in today if somebody had walloped them with a wing mirror on the way to trying to kill them.’
He had a point, she realised. But she wasn’t most folk, and she had no confidence in her capacity for rest these days. ‘I thought I’d just look for the DNA profiles,’ she said. ‘I photographed the ones from Gabriel Abbott’s letter and sent them to River last night. I need to give her something to compare them with.’
Jason lifted the first box on to his desk. ‘I’ll give you a hand, then. But only if you promise you’ll knock off when we find them.’ He gave her an uncertain grin, not sure if he’d overstepped the mark.
Karen had an unsettling moment of recognition. What Jason had said was the sort of thing that Phil would have said back when they all worked together. She nearly tucked it away without further examination, but then she remembered Jason’s plaintive words. She really should try harder. So, ‘That’s the kind of deal Phil would have made,’ she said.
Jason’s eyes flared with panic, then he realised she was reaching out to him. He came up with a tentative smile. ‘I managed to learn some things from him.’ He propped the box lid with its index list against his monitor and started sifting through the files. ‘The first round’s on you. That’s one of the other things I learned from him.’
Karen couldn’t help smiling. A poignant, sad smile, but a smile nonetheless. It was a start. She sat on the floor next to one of the boxes, trying not to grimace as her shoulder complained. She began the slow task of sorting the paperwork. They had a system they’d developed over the years. It involved a series of piles. Evidence, crime scene photographs, analysis, witness statements, suspect details. Then those piles themselves were sorted into separate stacks, depending on how Karen and Jason were approaching the material. Sometimes they arranged them by date, sometimes by subject, sometimes by individuals. It was Karen’s idiosyncratic method and Jason, trained up in it since he’d joined the unit, had adopted it uncritically.
So they worked through the paperwork, which seemed to have been dumped in the boxes at random, no organising principle apparent. ‘This is chaos,’ Jason complained.
‘It was a big case,’ Karen said. ‘There will have been a lot of people working on different bits of it. And there will have been a review at some point, which is why the index sheets in the lids have no relationship to what order things are in, or even if they’re in the right boxes.’ She tutted. ‘I don’t know why people can’t put things back where they found them,’ she muttered.
Halfway through the second box, she found what she was looking for. There, in a plastic envelope, were the DNA profiles of all four victims of the Cessna crash. It was how they’d confirmed their identities. Samples had been taken from their homes – hairbrushes, toothbrushes, laundry baskets – and compared to the DNA extracted from the fragments of flesh and bone that had rained down on a Borders hillside. ‘Got them,’ she said. ‘You can stop now.’
Jason looked up, a dazed expression in his eyes. ‘Sorry?’
‘I’ve found the DNA. You can knock it on the head for tonight.’
He gave her the straightforward smile of a child. ‘Brilliant. I was kind of lost in what I was looking at. I’m glad I wasn’t one of the guys on the ground after that. Bits of bodies and bits of plane, like the world’s worst jigsaw.’
Karen got up, making what she called ‘old people noises’ as the pain kicked in again. ‘You and me both. I need to scan Caroline and Ellie’s DNA profiles and send them off to River. It’s a Wednesday, she’ll still be in the lab. Then we can go to the pub. Just for one, mind, because you’re driving back to Kirkcaldy.’
He curled his lip in an expression of disgust. ‘I need to sort out someplace else to live. It’s great getting my breakfast cooked, but it’s too much hassle to drive back and forward every day. I’ll start looking at the weekend.’
‘No more students, though, Jason. Maybe it’s time you started thinking about buying?’
He looked aghast. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Buying? That’s for grown-ups.’
Karen laughed as she laid Caroline Abbott’s profile on the glass plate of the scanner. ‘You are a grown-up now, Jason. Time to take responsibility for yourself.’
He shook his head. ‘I’ll leave that to you, boss. You’re better at it than me.’
She scanned the second sheet, shaking her head. ‘I’ll tell you a secret, Jason. I just talk a better game. Deep down, I’m as scared as everybody else.’
49
Dr River Wilde was indeed still in the lab. W
henever she was in Dundee, she worked as long as she could bear, partly to justify the deal she’d negotiated with the university and partly because there was nothing to love about the tiny modern studio flat she was renting near the Victoria Dock. She was eating pizza at her desk while reading a revised PhD thesis on the chemical analysis of tooth enamel when Karen’s message pinged into her inbox.
She opened the attachments and sent them to the printer, thoughtfully chewing a chunk of crust as she read the email. She set the PhD to one side and summoned up the DNA analysis of Frank the dog’s DNA, which had come back from the vet school that afternoon with the comment, ‘Doesn’t look much like a dog to me!’
Now she had five DNA profiles to compare. So that she wouldn’t prejudge that comparison, Karen had not told her who they belonged to. The two she’d sent from her phone were labelled A and B; the two she’d just sent over were C and D. And of course, there was Frank the dog.
River laid the five sheets in front of her. They looked like elongated barcodes. To the untrained eye, there was little connectivity between them. But although it wasn’t her area of specialism, River had been looking at DNA comparisons for years and she’d learned how to make sense of the patterns.
She moved them around so they formed different relationships to one another. And finally, she had the patterns clear in her head. In all probability, C was the mother of A, whose father’s DNA was not one of the selection in front of her: B was the child of D and Frank the Dog. A and B were completely unrelated.
She double-checked her findings then put them together in an annotated email attachment to Karen. Hope this is helpful, she added in her message. Give me a call if you need to talk it through.
Almost instantly, River’s FaceTime icon started chirruping at her. She connected with Karen, who looked both exhausted and excited. ‘Thanks for this,’ she said. ‘I just need to run through it with you to be sure I’ve got it right.’
‘OK. But you look more like you need to be in bed,’ River said.
‘I had a wee run-in with an SUV late last night.’