City of Strangers

by Louise Millar

  ‘Did you not fancy going over to be with your sons?’

  ‘Ach, well, you don’t want to make a nuisance.’ He pointed at the bird ornaments on the windowsill. ‘They keep getting me these. I don’t even like birds. It was my wife.’

  ‘Right. So this was new, was it, David coming to Scotland to see you?’

  ‘Aye.’ Mr Pearce coughed again, and his eyes watered.

  ‘And why did he come?’

  Mr Pearce waved a bony hand. ‘He was angry.’

  ‘Angry with you?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Aye. I sold my house and the boys weren’t happy.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, no point me having the money sitting in a house when the grandkids could use it. But my sons didn’t like it. Think they wanted to sell it after I’d gone. Didn’t want me spending all the money on this place!’

  ‘So what—’ Sula started, but the old man cut across her, anger entering his voice.

  ‘But it was ma house! Treating me like an old man. I was angry. I told David, don’t come here and tell me what I’m doing wrong, when you’re not even there when your mother dies.’ A look of astonishment entered Mr Pearce’s eyes, and his voice broke. He searched around again, only moving his upper body.

  Sula crossed the room for a box of tissues. ‘Here you go, Mr Pearce.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He dabbed at his eyes. A low wail came from his mouth. ‘Who would kill my son? Who would do that to him?’

  Sula counted to ten, waiting for it to stop. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sympathetic; she just had a story to file.

  ‘I don’t know, Mr Pearce, but I can promise you the police will be doing everything they can to find out. But you’re sure David – or you – didn’t know Colin McFarlay? Or his family?’

  ‘No . . .’ His head dipped, and she knew she’d lost him.

  He pointed at a pot of tea. ‘Want a cup?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘A wee half-cup?’

  ‘No, but I’m going to leave you to yours.’ Sula stood up, guessing time was running out. If the FLO had popped up to the local shops, she could be back any moment. ‘Listen, I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr Pearce. And anything I find out, I’m going to let you know, OK?’

  ‘David’s wife and my other son are arriving on Sunday, for the . . . to do the . . .’ He stopped, and used his tissue.

  ‘Your son Philip?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That’s useful to know,’ Sula said. ‘Thank you.’

  She reached the door.

  Mr Pearce’s voice wavered over to her. ‘They talked about the dog finding the top of my son’s head in your paper. Down the pit cave.’

  Sula held the door handle. She knew the report. She’d written it.

  Mr Pearce’s eyes drifted away. ‘It made me think about him, when he was a wee boy, in the bath. He had this curly hair, and he’d hold his breath under the water, and his head would pop up . . .’ His cheeks filled with air, then released into a sorry smile. He patted an imaginary child’s head.

  Sula nodded. ‘It’s no’ a fair world, Mr Pearce.’

  His watery eyes tried to hold her there, no other power left to him. ‘Will you find out who did this?’

  ‘I promise I’ll do my best. So will the police. You’ve got one of the best on this case. DI Robertson. I know him. Now you take care. Enjoy your tea.’

  She left the retirement home and walked towards the car, phone to her ear. DS Foley passed her with a sandwich bag, her expression turning stern as their eyes met.

  ‘Ewan,’ Sula said into his voicemail, opening her car door. ‘Find out how much David Pearce’s father sold his house for in Colinton. I want to know how that money was split between the family. Dad says the grandkids got it and David Pearce wasn’t happy about it.’

  It was nothing, but maybe something.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Amsterdam

  Grace sat in Nicu’s office, her research plans for the story disintegrating in front of her.

  Mrs Cozma hated Lucian?

  Nicu translated the rest, as she typed at his Mac.

  ‘So it sounds like Mrs Cozma comes up while you’re talking to her husband and says, “What do you not understand? . . . He was hunting for them. This woman and her child. They were hiding. Running for their lives.” Who’s she talking about?’

  ‘Anna and Valentin – his wife and child,’ Grace said, halting. ‘Hang on. She said they were hiding from Lucian?’

  ‘Yup. Then she says, “This man. He’s a monster. You want to know who Lucian Tronescu was? He was—”’

  Grace cut in. ‘Who’s Lucian Tronescu?’

  Nicu paused the clip, leaning over the desk. ‘I don’t know, but “Tronescu” is a Romanian surname.’ He played it again. ‘Now her husband’s trying to stop her talking to you, but she’s angry. She says, “Listen to me. Lucian Tronescu was a killer, just like his father . . . Two months he forced us to keep him here, in London, or his people will hurt my family in Rutaslava. I thank God he’s dead. I’ll thank God every day . . .”’

  Grace typed on, baffled, and then heard Mr Cozma, now in English. ‘Please leave my family in peace. We will not speak to you again.’

  Her hands flew to her head. ‘I don’t understand, Nicu. Why are they calling him Lucian Tronescu? I clearly said I was looking for Lucian Grabole.’

  He sat against the desk, folding his arms. ‘Sounds like they know he has another name, too.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘That doesn’t make sense. The guy she’s describing sounds like a psycho. Everyone who knows Lucian Grabole loved him. They keep saying what a nice guy he was.’

  She smelt a faint scent of the Indian oil as Nicu reached across her for the mouse and summoned a Google map of Romania. A boat puttered past, and Grace felt an urge to jump out of the window and escape on it, away from these increasingly disturbing revelations about Lucian, and this cramped room and this physical restlessness she felt around this man.

  Rutaslava, the village Mrs Cozma mentioned, appeared. It was isolated in a mountain area, a single name in a mass of green emptiness, with just one hair’s-breath road passing through it. Nicu zoomed out.

  ‘Wow, that’s remote,’ Grace said.

  Nicu reduced it. ‘These places are cut off.’

  Other villages appeared at the corners, linked by the road, but equally rural. Eventually, a major road appeared, then a major town, maybe fifty miles from the village.

  ‘Ah. OK. I know this town,’ Nicu pointed. ‘One of my cousins works at a hospital there. I’ll ring her. See if she knows anyone closer to the mountain.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Needing air and time to think, she went out to the deck, and swirled a rotten yellow leaf through the water, considering the new revelations.

  Two names for the dead man. If Lucian Tronescu was a violent criminal who’d entered and worked in the UK using the false surname Grabole, it would certainly explain why the Edinburgh police hadn’t identified the body yet.

  Inside, she heard Nicu talking in Romanian. He appeared a few minutes later, stretching up to hold the door frame. ‘She doesn’t know Rutaslava, but one of the nurses at her hospital drives in from that mountain. She’s going to ask if she’s heard of any Tronescus up there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Grace said weakly.

  Last night in the cafe, she’d started to plan her research. Now, with Nicu’s help, the story was twisting ahead so rapidly she couldn’t keep up.

  Partly that’s because he was treating this like a story.

  Yet, for her, it wasn’t just a story. It was personal.

  Nicu squinted. ‘You look worried.’

  ‘No,’ she lied. ‘I just realized I forgot to get more euros. Is there a cash machine nearby?’

  Her resolve not to tell Mac what she was doing had dissolved the minute she heard the dead man in their flat might be a murderer.

  She walked quickly to the bridge, and rang him.
/>   He answered after three rings. ‘Hey, darlin’, how you doing?’

  ‘OK. How’s the golf?’

  ‘Great. Sun’s been out. Got burned today. We’re just having dinner at the clubhouse. What’s up?’

  ‘Can you talk?’

  Three minutes later, she wished she hadn’t bothered.

  She’d expected him to be pissed off. But not to go mental.

  ‘Amsterdam? You’re fuckin’ joking me? This dead guy again. I can’t believe you, Grace. How much is this costing us?’

  When she’d mentioned the dead man might be a murderer, it only got worse. ‘God’s sake. Why are you getting involved with this? Get back and let the police do their job. I mean it. If you don’t, I’m ringing DI Robertson and telling him what’s going on.’

  ‘Mac, I just rang to tell you what was happening. You don’t have to—’

  ‘Grace. Just get home.’ For the first time in their lives, he slammed down the phone. She headed back to Nicu’s boat, cursing under her breath. What had she expected? That he’d say, ‘Hey, darlin’, good for you – hold your nerve and go for it. This could be your big break.’

  He never had before.

  Nicu met her at the door with significant news. The hospital nurse his cousin knew was friends with someone who lived in the next village to Rutaslava and had a brother working on a building site in Amsterdam. This guy had agreed to meet them after his shift tonight.

  ‘I’ll take you, if you want.’

  She grabbed a pen, her resolve returning. ‘That’s fantastic. What’s his name?’

  Nicu took out peppers from the fridge. ‘He doesn’t want you to know.’

  She lowered her pen. ‘Why? Is he illegal?’

  His knife froze above the red flesh, and he frowned. ‘Yeah, he’s illegal. Causing trouble. You’ve read the headlines. That’s us Romanians.’

  She flushed. ‘Sorry. That was stupid. I didn’t mean that to sound . . .’

  Then a smile appeared, and he laughed.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  He tapped the pepper with the knife. ‘Want some food?’

  ‘Oh. No,’ she said, realizing what he was doing. ‘Please, let me make dinner, or buy it for us, or something. You’re already putting me up for nothing.’

  He cut off a piece of pepper, threw it up and caught it in his mouth. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m intrigued now, anyway. “Who’s the Guy?” It’s a good story.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, touched. Why couldn’t Mac have said that?

  Nicu turned on music, gave her a beer, and began to cook. Grace wandered outside, deciding the least she could do was give him space, and thought about her fight with Mac.

  Mac did this too often.

  Story or no story, she’d decide when she went back. Not him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The plan was to eat, then go and meet the Romanian builder by the flats where he was working, at five o’clock. Halfway there, however, he rang Nicu to change location to a bridge, half a mile away.

  Ten minutes later, he changed it again.

  ‘Why’s he doing this?’ Grace said.

  Nicu reversed the Jeep in a dead end. ‘Don’t know. Sounds nervous.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No idea. Why don’t I talk to him first?’

  The final location was an alleyway in De Wallen, the red light district. Nicu parked by a church near the canal. The street was packed with tourists making the strange trail through back alleys displaying windows featuring women in underwear.

  ‘I’ll be back in five,’ Nicu said, getting out.

  Through the windscreen, she saw him enter the alleyway and shake hands with a figure in the shadows. They moved out of sight. A trail of cigarette smoke was the only proof they were there.

  Waiting with her recorder and camera, Grace tried to imagine what more new revelations there might be about Lucian Grabole/Tronescu. There was a movement to her left. A curtain opened in a window, and a girl sat down on a stool, her legs splayed, her décolletage a little sweaty. Where had she come from and how had this become her life? How many countries did these girls come from? Did their families know where they really were? She watched the trail of stag parties, egging each other on, laughing too loudly, bouncing on the balls of their feet, nervous.

  Inside the open door of a church, opposite, an elderly lady prayed at the altar. In the candlelight, her face was pained, framed by the arched door. Grace picked up her camera and—

  A rap on the taxi window made her start. Nicu jumped in the driver’s seat.

  The alleyway was empty.

  ‘What’s happening? Where is he?’

  Nicu started the engine, his face serious.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she repeated.

  ‘He’s not going to speak to you.’

  ‘Why?’ She twisted round, desperate not to lose this lead.

  Nicu drove off through throngs of tourists, beeping to move a large party of men, who jeered and lifted their cans at him. ‘Because he’s freaked out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This guy, Lucian Tronescu. He knows him. Or knows of him.’

  She twisted behind her. ‘Oh God, please, Nicu, go back. He might know something important.’

  Instead, he turned onto a main road. ‘Listen, he’s not going to speak to you. But he says Lucian Tronescu definitely sounds like your dead guy – 1.78 metres tall, forties, wolf tattoo, Romanian.’

  Grace turned on her voice recorder. ‘And what else?’

  Nicu checked in his rear-view mirror. ‘Well, it’s kind of crazy. He says Lucian Tronescu’s family are infamous on that mountain. Right across the region, actually. We’d probably have found people in the town who knew them, too. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, Lucian’s father, Drac Tronescu, did freelance jobs for the Romanian Securitate.’

  ‘What – the secret police?’

  ‘Yup. He was a paid assassin for them.’

  Her mouth fell open. ‘I thought the secret police killed people themselves?’

  ‘Apparently, Drac was freelance – a kind of self-employed psychopath. Did the high-level jobs when they didn’t want to rock the boat politically. Party members planning a coup. People they wanted rid of without alienating Western trade partners. Mistresses with too much inside knowledge, that kind of thing . . . The rumour was that Drac had a line in pushing people off bridges and trains, so it looked like suicide or an accident.’

  Grace listened, astonished. ‘What, a kind of state-licensed serial killer?’

  ‘Yeah, but apparently he killed for kicks, too, around the mountain, and nobody stopped him. Like it was his perk.’

  ‘Do you think it’s true – not a myth?’

  Nicu glanced over. ‘Me personally?’

  ‘Well, did you live in Romania under Ceaus̨escu? Do you remember the secret police?’

  ‘My parents did. We left when I was three.’

  ‘But these things did happen?’

  He shrugged. ‘A lot of things happened. There’s books about it – you might be able to verify it somewhere, though I’m guessing not all the records survived.’

  ‘So where does Lucian fit in?’

  Nicu cut through an alleyway to avoid the tourists. ‘Right, so Lucian Tronescu is Drac’s son. They worked together – father-and-son assassins. The guy says people are still scared of them up there, even after twenty-five years. I wouldn’t be surprised if Drac was a nickname for the father – it means “devil” in Romanian.’

  She imagined breaking that particular news to Mac. ‘So what happened to them?’

  ‘Drac was hanged during the uprising in 1989, two days after Ceaus̨escu. But Lucian escaped.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Same time – he was a teenager . . .’

  ‘So he’d be –’ Grace swallowed ‘– about forty now. Like the dead man in my flat.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And the guy back there, did he know Lucian Tronescu?’

&
nbsp; ‘No. Never met him. But his aunt knew the Tronescus. When Lucian was a kid, he threw her dog down a well. Took five days to die.’

  They stopped at traffic lights, and a man vomited in a gutter by Grace’s window.

  This man had been in her flat?

  ‘Did he know where Lucian is now?’

  Nicu drove on. ‘Said he escaped to Paris, and went underground. Changed his name. That was the rumour. Lucian’s mother stayed on the mountain. That’s what she told people – her son was in Paris, though apparently she was mentally ill, so who knows?’

  Grace held up a finger. ‘At the Edinburgh night shelter, they said Lucian had been in Paris.’

  ‘Right. So it fits.’

  ‘So maybe that’s when he changed his name to Lucian Grabole, to hide out?’

  Nicu slowed to a crawl as they hit a row of shops selling giant clogs and windmill pencils, and tourists crossed between them. ‘Maybe. But the interesting thing is – I’m guessing why he spoke to us tonight – he says Romanians in Amsterdam swear they’ve seen Lucian Tronescu here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But how would they know,’ she protested, ‘if he was a teenager when he left Romania? He’d be twenty-five years older now.’

  ‘Apparently, he’s the spit of Drac. Remember, they were famous up there. He’s been seen here by a few people, using a false name.’

  ‘So the Lucian Grabole who lived in Mitti’s apartment block could have been Lucian Tronescu using false papers and a false name?’

  Nicu tapped the wheel. ‘Maybe. The guy’s going to ask around, if you keep his name out of it. But he won’t meet you – people are scared of these guys.’

  ‘So why don’t they just report him to the Romanian authorities?’

  ‘Same reason, maybe. Maybe they’re hoping the police or a journalist like you will do the job for them. Then they can stay out of it.’

  She wondered how much experience Nicu thought she had. ‘OK. Well, thanks.’

  ‘No problem.’ Nicu swore as the Jeep got stuck behind a horse-and-carriage tourist ride.