Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  ‘What pub were they in?’

  ‘A place called The Brothers on Saracen Street. You know it?’

  ‘Aye. Lovely place,’ Danny answered with more than a hint of irony. ‘So I’m guessing there’s a reason you’re telling us all this, Mr Baillie.’

  The old man smiled sweetly.

  ‘I can see why you used to be a polisman, Mr Neilson.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was a policeman. I only said I wasn’t one now.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Baillie smiled again. ‘But if you live as long as I have, you tend to have a nose for these things.’

  The old guy was sharp, that was for sure.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Danny nodded. ‘So, the reason you’re telling us this . . .’

  ‘Like I said, it’s my job to protect the family and the traveller way of life. Young Sam’s not a bad lad, just a bit . . . headstrong. If he keeps doing what we hear he’s doing, then he’ll get himself killed. And he’ll also bring lashav on us: shame. The traveller reputation is bad enough already with all the lies people tell. Thing is, I can’t go to the polis even if I thought they’d be interested. There’s not what you’d call a mutual trust there and I’m trying to keep Sam out of the jail as well as out of the grave. I also need to stop Jered here and the others from going into Glasgow and making things worse. What I need is someone else: someone who knows Glasgow and would know how to find things out. A person like that would be useful and I’d certainly owe them a debt.’

  Winter and Neilson looked at each other.

  ‘So you would be able to offer something in return, Mr Baillie?’ Danny asked.

  ‘It would be the honourable thing to do, Mr Neilson. Our clan is many and wide. I think there may be something in what you say about a young girl who disappeared. I’d be prepared to find out more and tell you what you need to hear.’

  Winter snapped at the man.

  ‘If you know something, maybe you should just tell us now. The girl was murdered, for fucksake!’

  Jered pushed himself in front of Baillie, squaring up to Winter until they were standing nose to nose.

  ‘I told you to mind your manners,’ he growled.

  ‘No. You told him to mind his manners,’ Winter corrected him.

  ‘Now, now Jered,’ Tommy Baillie soothed. ‘Come away from the young man. I’m sure Mr Neilson realises the way these things work. Young folk, eh, Mr Neilson? All that hot blood isn’t good for them at all.’

  ‘Right enough, Mr Baillie. You’re right enough. Here’s what we’ll do for you: we’ll make some discreet enquiries about your boy Sam. I can’t make any promises about what happens to him though. If he’s as full of that hot blood as you say, then he’ll have to make that decision himself.’

  Baillie nodded sagely.

  ‘So very true, Mr Neilson. We can show the young the paths they should take but only they can walk them. You are a gentleman. And I will make . . . how did you put it now, “discreet enquiries” about the young lady.’

  Danny put an arm between Tony and Jered, separating them and forcing both to take a step backward.

  ‘Okay. We’ll be on our way, Mr Baillie, but we’ll be back. One last thing: do you know anything about a man who lived near here by the name of Laurence Paton?’

  ‘No. Never heard of him. How about you, Jered?’

  Jered shook his head, still scowling at Winter.

  ‘No. Like Uncle says, never heard of him.’

  Winter and Neilson emerged into the travellers’ site, the cold immediately attacking them after the warmth of the caravan. As they negotiated the icy steps into the yard, they saw Peter and two other young men standing watching them. The three of them took a few steps towards their visitors but stopped in their tracks when Neilson gave them a cheery wave. Instead, they settled for glaring at the incomers and making a show of seeing them off the premises.

  As they were about to exit the site, Winter looked back over his shoulder and nudged Neilson.

  ‘Old Tommy said he didn’t own a television set, right? So how come there’s a TV aerial stuck on the top of his caravan?’

  ‘I know, son. I saw it on the way in. The lying old bugger was pulling our chain from the moment we walked in there. He either knows a whole lot more or a whole lot less than he’s telling us.’

  CHAPTER 22

  Friday 7 December

  The road to Dundee took Narey past Stirling. As the motorway cruised above the ancient capital, the castle resplendent high on the rock but still below her, she couldn’t help but think of Laurence Paton. Her dad had been right about him all along. His nose had told him Paton was involved. No one had been able to prove it back then but she was determined she would now. She would also deal with anything else that crawled out from under the same stone Paton had been hiding under.

  The drive north wasn’t one she took often but this point in the road, towering above the Highland fault line, with the sweep of the Ochils to her right, Stirling Castle and the Wallace Monument ahead of her and the mountains of Ben Lomond, Ben Vorlich and Ben Ledi beyond, was her favourite. That day, with seemingly every inch of the Bens covered in snow against an icy blue backdrop and frozen fields below, it looked even more spectacular than usual. They used to call Stirling the gateway to the Highlands and high on the M80 you could see why. Narey hoped it would prove to be a gateway of sorts for her too.

  Professor Kirsten Fairweather had sounded friendly enough on the phone and certainly seemed intrigued by the little Narey had told her. She’d been unwilling to commit herself to getting involved until she’d heard the whole story so Narey was on her way north to convince her face to face. The whole sorry mess and all its implications were too much to attempt over a telephone.

  It wasn’t the easiest of drives with snow by the side of the motorway and so much buzzing through her head; she tried to clear the latter by turning the car’s CD player up to full blast. Even the contrasting efforts of Kings of Leon, Take That and Plan B couldn’t dismiss thoughts of Paton and his blackmailer or the wretched remains of Lily of the Lake – or her dad. The guilt of him being in the home was eating away at her. Narey also felt for Tony, remorseful about dragging him and Danny into this and knowing she should never have persuaded them to break into Paton’s house. What the hell had she been thinking? There was just too much bloody guilt flying around and little of it seemed to be attached to those who deserved it.

  Somehow, she managed to negotiate the M80 and the M9 safely and a little less than an hour and a half after she’d left Glasgow behind, Dundee loomed into view. She’d never really been one for going along with the usual Glaswegian habit of ridiculing Dundee, making gags about unmarried mothers and it being stuck in the eighties.

  Her mum and dad had often taken her to Broughty Ferry for summer holidays as a child; long days on the beach with fish suppers at Murray’s chippy on Gray Street and ice cream from Vissochi’s, which was further along on the other side of the road. It was at Vissochi’s that she’d lost a wobbly tooth while munching her way through the biggest knickerbocker glory she’d ever seen and had hidden it in case her mum made her stop eating. Holidays in the Ferry had meant regular trips into Dundee and she’d liked the place. Glasgow it wasn’t but not so bad for all that.

  For years now it had understandably campaigned to get rid of its old tag as the city of ‘jute, jam and journalism’ and had rebranded itself the City of Discovery, owing to the fact that it had Scott of the Antarctic’s old boat as a tourist attraction. Narey couldn’t help but wonder what discoveries the city had in store.

  CAHiD stood for the Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification and was based in the College of Life Sciences, not far from the main University of Dundee building. A fearsome-looking middle-aged receptionist regarded Narey with some suspicion when she claimed she had an appointment to see Professor Fairweather. The woman directed Narey into a chair and said she would see if the professor was expecting anyone. Narey conceded to herself that her telephone chat with the pr
of might well have bypassed the front desk but she still wondered if everyone was subjected to this guard dog treatment.

  The question was registered redundant a few minutes later when the receptionist was beaten back to the desk by a smiling blonde woman in jeans and a T-shirt, her hand outstretched in greeting. The frosty guard dog was trotting menacingly at her heels, clearly not happy at anyone else being welcomed into the house.

  ‘Sergeant Narey? I’m Kirsty. Come on through.’

  ‘Call me Rachel, please. Thanks for taking the time to see me.’

  ‘No probs. What you told me on the phone sounds very interesting, if mysterious. Annabelle, if anyone’s looking for me for the next . . .’ she looked at Narey questioningly, ‘hour? Yes, the next hour, then tell them I’ve flown to Baghdad.’

  The receptionist nodded truculently and Narey took the opportunity to smile broadly and ironically at Annabelle as she passed on her way into the professor’s office. The old bag did her best to smile back grudgingly but failed miserably.

  ‘Sorry about Annabelle,’ Kirsty Fairweather said breezily as the door closed. ‘I inherited her from my predecessor and she’s a pain in the arse. Very efficient and all that but not exactly friendly. She thinks I should still be in school rather than running a university department.’

  Narey wasn’t sure what she’d expected but Kirsty wasn’t it. Still, Fairweather’s reputation preceded her and Narey had read enough to know that the prof had been there, done it and bought the T-shirt. She’d worked in Iraq and Afghanistan on behalf of the United Nations, identifying bodies of victims as a prelude to war crimes tribunals, as well as featuring in some heavy duty murder trials in the UK – clearly not just a pretty face.

  It struck Narey that it was a wonder the press hadn’t cottoned on to Fairweather’s youth and good looks and plastered her across the tabloids. She must have been fighting the bastards off with a stick, Narey thought.

  ‘Right, so tell me about your girl. I did a bit of Googling about her before you got here but it was all from donkey’s years ago so I thought I’d better wait and get the lowdown from you. They call her Lily, don’t they?’

  ‘The press did, yes. As in Lily of the Lake. It stuck. There was huge publicity, initially all over the UK, Crimewatch and the like, but after a while only in Scotland. Despite all that, she was never identified.’

  ‘Which is why you’re here?’

  ‘Basically, yes.’

  ‘And what about the non-basic?’

  Narey didn’t much like being on the receiving end of an interrogation.

  ‘I have a personal interest in the case. I’d rather not go into it. All you need to know is that I am determined to find out who Lily was. And who killed her. She was brutally murdered and the person who killed her has never been caught.’

  Fairweather held up a sheet of paper in front of her.

  ‘I know. I took the liberty of pulling copies of some of her file. Hope you don’t mind.’

  Narey did mind. She had been hoping to keep this all under the radar as far as Central Scotland cops were concerned. The professor seemed to read her thoughts.

  ‘I’ve got a few contacts on CID over there and one or two of them owe me favours,’ Fairweather told her. ‘I asked a DI if he’d get me these with no questions asked and he agreed. You might know him – Marty Croy?’

  Narey shook her head brusquely and Fairweather read the gesture for what it was.

  ‘He won’t say anything, Rachel. Not until you want him to.’

  Narey gave a curt nod. She didn’t have much option but to accept it.

  ‘Have you seen these?’ the professor asked, holding the sheet up again. ‘It’s pretty nasty stuff.’

  Narey didn’t say anything but held out her hand, trying to suppress the small surge of excitement in her stomach and thinking about how Tony felt in the same circumstances. Perhaps the only difference was she at least had the decency to feel guilty about it.

  Fairweather passed the A4 sheet of paper over along with a handful of others. As she turned them, Narey saw that they were all high-quality prints of the original police photographs, all images of the batterered, bludgeoned head and decaying figure of the girl known as Lily.

  ‘Jesus,’ she gasped involuntarily, immediately annoyed at herself. She’d seen plenty of dead bodies.

  ‘Not nice, is it?’ Fairweather sympathised. ‘I’ve seen plenty and I’m sure you have too but there’s something particularly nasty about that being done to a girl half our age.’

  Narey couldn’t disagree with the professor’s sentiments. She was faced with a picture of horror and its constituent parts leapt at her from the page: blackened, receding skin; broken bone; one blind eye; dirt-streaked blonde hair; bite marks.

  Something lurched deep inside Narey, something far deeper than the guilty adrenalin rush at seeing these photographs. It was a memory and a knowledge and a determination all rolled into one instant. Danny Neilson had been right with something he’d said to her: in her desperation to help her dad and prove he’d been right about Paton, she was in danger of forgetting the girl at the heart of it. Her intention was right but her motive had been all wrong.

  ‘Pictures of Lily,’ Narey murmured.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s an old song. By The Who, I think. Sorry, I don’t know what made me think of that.’

  ‘Before my time,’ Fairweather grinned, her smile slowly disappearing, morphing into a frown. She looked at Narey.

  ‘Rachel, if you want my help to find out who she was and who did this to her, then I’m in.’

  Narey’s eyes closed as she bobbed her head in agreement.

  ‘I do. I wanted to do all this myself but I’m not sure that’s possible. I do want your help.’

  Another lengthy pause hung between them as Fairweather weighed up whether to ask the question Narey’s response begged of her. She decided against it.

  ‘Okay. It will take a bit of time and we’ll need Central’s permission to get the body exhumed. Marty Croy can help with that and it’s probably best if you meet him. From what I can see from the photographs, it should be a piece of cake.’

  ‘You’ll be able to put a face to her?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. There will be an amount of guesswork but it will be fairly accurate. The frustrating thing is that it could have been done back then with the right knowhow. It was what it was back in the nineties. We could and would have done so much more with her today. But, all being well, we still can.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  Fairweather smiled. ‘When it comes to this kind of thing, the old cliché is right: the difficult we can do right away, the impossible takes a little longer. Assuming we are able to exhume her and the skeleton is in good condition, I’ll be able to give you a sketch by the next day. A 3D model will take a while longer. To be honest, and I’m not sure I care how terrible this sounds, I can’t wait to dig her up and begin to put her together again.’

  The professor’s chilling enthusiasm reminded Narey of someone else and she made a mental note to keep the two of them apart. Fairweather was young, blonde, pretty and with a ghoulish interest in death. There was no way she was introducing Professor Kirsty to Tony.

  ‘Kirsty, given that you’d already gone to the trouble to find out so much about the case, why did you ask me to tell you all about her?’

  Fairweather grinned.

  ‘I wanted to know the stuff that isn’t in here.’ She indicated the files. ‘You know better than I do that case notes only tell you so much.’

  ‘Like my reasons for being involved?’

  ‘Yes. I like cold cases, Rachel. They tickle my bones. Partly it’s because I like the idea that the victims aren’t forgotten. The very fact that we get involved shows me that someone cares enough to dig them up. I’m always fascinated by the reason why.’

  ‘It’s my job,’ Narey replied flatly. ‘That’s reason enough.’

  Fairweather smiled and they both knew
it was more than that.

  ‘Okay, fair enough,’ the professor nodded. ‘Let’s get to work. I’ll set up a meeting for you with Marty Croy and hopefully that will be the first step to bringing your Lily back. “Pictures of Lily” – that’s what you said, right? I’ll get those for you.’

  CHAPTER 23

  It took only two rings before Tony picked up. Rachel was sitting in her Megane on the top floor of the multi-storey car park in Bell Street, shivering while snowflakes were swatted away from her windscreen by groaning wipers.

  ‘Hi. It’s me.’

  ‘I know. Display, remember. How did you get on with your professor?’

  ‘She’s going to do it.’

  He could hear the excitement in her voice and was pleased for her. Although he was also increasingly worried she was investing too much of herself in this and he hated to think how she’d be if it didn’t pan out as she hoped. Still, they both needed her to know that he was on her side about it.

  ‘Great. That’s brilliant news, Rach. How long does she reckon she will need to do it?’

  ‘It all depends on how long it will take for her to convince Central to get their arses into gear. After that it hopefully won’t be more than a matter of days.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  Rachel hesitated.

  ‘She was fine. Nice. It’s snowing a bloody blizzard up here. What’s the weather like back in civilisation?’

  ‘Freezing but not snowing at the moment.’

  ‘Good. Have you managed to find the other emails between Paton and Irving?’

  ‘Give me a chance! I’m not sure where the hell to start but it’s do-able in theory. The emails still exist somewhere out there in cyberspace. We just need to find out where.’

  ‘Find them for me? Please?’

  ‘I’ll try. When are you coming back down the road?’

  ‘Right now. What are you up to?’