Broken Ground (Karen Pirie Book 5)

by Val McDermid

  Markie wondered how Pirie had survived in the job as long as she had. The woman seemed to have no understanding of how relationships with colleagues were built. How had she been allowed to spiral so far out of control? Closing cases was all well and good, but in the modern police service, being a team player involved more than a team of two. Clearly Pirie couldn’t be brought to heel. She had to be replaced. And once Markie had the HCU sorted, it would be a very different sort of operation. One that understood the importance of a chain of command. And didn’t see insubordination as a badge of pride. ‘And was it?’ she asked, cutting straight to the point and setting off along the path again.

  ‘Was it what?’

  ‘A cold case.’ The unspoken ‘you idiot’ hung in the air.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve not heard back from the ginger ninja. The thing is, if it is a proper case, she should have taken me, not him. I’m the senior officer. And she’s left me on this complete balls-ache of an inquiry that’s going nowhere. I’m driving all round the country talking to people who owned a Rover 214 in 1986 on the off-chance that one of them is going to put their hands up to an old series of rapes that might just squeeze out a single rape-murder. As if. Murray should be doing that, not me. It’s about all he’s up to.’

  Markie slowed and stopped, staring out over the rippled darkness of the loch. ‘Do you think she suspects I’ve put you in there to report back on how she’s running her wee empire?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t seem to know, Gerry. You used to have your finger on the pulse back when you were my bagman. Don’t tell me you’ve lost your touch. I wouldn’t want to think I’d misplaced my belief in you.’

  He sighed. ‘I think she doesn’t trust anybody except Murray, and that’s only because he’s too stupid to betray her.’

  ‘Well, your job is to make her trust you.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can. I just … ‘

  ‘What? You just what, Gerry?’ Markie sounded friendly now. Anyone who knew her well would have run for the hills.

  ‘I’m not sure what this is all in aid of. That’s all.’

  ‘Don’t worry about things that are permanently going to be above your pay grade. Do what I ask of you and you’ll be fine. You don’t want to disappoint me, Gerry.’

  He swallowed the lump that seemed to have formed in his throat. ‘I get that. But if I knew—’

  ‘You want to go back to the MIT, don’t you?’

  Right then, he wanted to go anywhere Ann Markie wasn’t. ‘I’ll sort it,’ he said.

  ‘Good. And don’t pull a stunt like this again, Gerry.’ Contempt dripped from her voice. She put two fingers to her lips and let out a piercing whistle. The dog came crashing out of the shrubbery and jumped up on Gerry McCartney, smearing his trousers with mud.

  He skittered away, wondering whether she’d trained the yappy little bastard to do that. It wouldn’t have surprised him in the least. For a fleeting moment, he wondered whether he’d backed the wrong horse in a race he hadn’t even known was being run.

  23

  2018 – Wester Ross

  For a woman accustomed to attacking insomnia by quartering the labyrinthine streets of Edinburgh with its wynds and closes, its pends and yards, its vennels and courts, where buildings crowded close in unexpected configurations, the empty acres of the Highlands offered limited possibilities. Once Jason had gone to bed, Karen had soon realised sleep was going to be elusive. The only option was her usual remedy.

  So she put her walking boots back on, shrugged into her jacket and set off into the night. The sky was clear and the light from the half-moon had no competition from street lights so the pale glow it shed was more than enough to see by. She turned right out of the yurt and followed the track for ten minutes till it ended in a churned-up turning circle by what looked like the remnants of a small stone bothy. Probably a shepherd’s hut, Karen told herself, based on what she knew was the most rudimentary guesswork. The wind had stilled and the sea shimmered in the moonlight, tiny rufflets of waves making the surface shiver. She stood for a while, absorbing the calm of the night, letting it soothe her restlessness.

  But it was too cold to stand still for long, and, sooner than she’d have liked, she retraced her steps up the track, past the yurt and beyond the crime scene, letting her thoughts spool back. She’d had dinner with Jason in the nearest pub – five miles up the road, over the county border into Sutherland. Cleverly, they kept the food menu simple – a range of pies from the famous shop in Lochinver, accompanied by hand-cut crispy chips and home-made baked beans. Until the food had been put in front of them, Karen hadn’t realised how hungry she was. Afterwards, she mentally scolded herself for being remiss; she should know by now that when she didn’t eat, her brain was the first organ to slow down.

  As they drove back, she reflected on the tail end of their interview with Hamish Mackenzie. The thing that had puzzled Karen was how the body had come to rest in the bog without anyone noticing. This was clearly a working croft, and from what Hamish had said, that had been the case when he had been growing up too. How then could someone dig a coffin-sized hole in the peat then fill it in without anybody noticing?

  Hamish had been adamant that his grandparents had known nothing about the bikes or the body. When Karen asked how that was possible, he’d been puzzled too. ‘When do you think this happened?’ he’d asked.

  ‘We’re not sure. But probably between twenty and twenty-five years ago.’

  Hamish nodded, light dawning in his face. ‘We moved to America in 1994 when I was twelve,’ he said. ‘My dad got a job at Stanford. Apart from a couple of short visits, I didn’t come back to the UK properly till I went to university in Edinburgh in 2000. And by the time I came back, to be brutally honest, the croft was in pretty sorry shape. My gran was in the early stages of dementia and my granddad was getting more and more frail. I started spending my holidays up here, trying to get things straightened out. Doing the hard physical labour that my granddad couldn’t manage on his own any longer. So I’m guessing that all sorts of things could have been happening on the land during those few years, and nobody would have noticed. You can’t really see that bit of the bog from the house, the way the land falls away. And nature’s quick to reclaim her own in these parts.’

  As was so often the way with cold cases, what looked at first like an unhelpful response could be open to another interpretation. A twist of the kaleidoscope and Hamish’s answer actually provided a window of opportunity. Those six years when he was California dreaming and the wheels were coming off his grandparents’ lives had provided a serendipitous opening for someone who knew what was hidden beneath the bog.

  ‘How long would it take to dig down to the crate without a digger?’ Karen had asked. ‘My experience of agriculture is limited to growing tomatoes on my balcony. And not very successfully at that.’

  He shook his head. ‘Unless you’ve got a cold frame or a wee greenhouse, you’ll struggle with tomatoes in Edinburgh. The wind’s too cold.’

  ‘I like a challenge. How long, though?’

  He drained his cup while he considered. ‘There must have been two of them at least, right? The victim and the shooter?’

  Karen raised her eyebrows. She hadn’t mentioned the involvement of a gun.

  Hamish shrugged one shoulder. ‘The local cops were talking about it when I took the coffee up, they didn’t seem bothered about me being there.’

  ‘They don’t get out much,’ Jason muttered, shaking his head in morose disapproval.

  ‘OK,’ Karen said. ‘At least two, yes.’

  ‘Probably two or three hours, then. If they were going flat out and they were in decent shape.’

  At least he didn’t know everything, she thought. Their victim had definitely been in more than decent shape. ‘So you could do it overnight?’

  ‘In the right conditions? Yeah, no bother. Especially if you’d had a spell of dry weather.’

 
And that had been that. Turning it over in her mind took her past the croft house – in darkness at this late hour – and up to the tarmacked road. She turned right and walked as far as the track that led down past the low stone cottage where the Somervilles had stayed. They’d cleared out as soon as their biometrics had been sampled, Will Somerville still huffy at being deprived of what he saw as his wife’s rightful inheritance.

  Now Karen’s thoughts turned to the crime scene photographs she and Jason had pored over when they got back from the pub. The degree of preservation of the soft tissue still surprised her. He looked like he’d been dead a matter of hours, not years. But studying the photographs in detail allowed Karen to see past the victim himself to the wider picture.

  The position of his body looked odd, somehow. He was twisted at the waist, as if the bottom half of his body had been immobilised when the gunshots spun his torso to one side. Karen had thumbed through the relevant shots, spreading them out on the top of the cabinets in the yurt. ‘Tell me if you think I’m full of nonsense,’ she said. ‘And it’s hard to be sure when I’ve only got the pix to go on, because by the time I arrived at the crime scene, the bike had been moved. But to me, it looks kind of like the bike was partly on top of him. Now, it might have fallen over that way. But I’m thinking maybe he was lifting the bike out of the hole when he was shot?’

  Jason had studied the photographs one by one, breathing heavily through his nose as he weighed up what Karen had suggested. ‘You could be right, boss. But why would you go to all that trouble to dig the bike up then shoot the big guy before you’ve got it out the hole?’

  That had been the killer question. Earlier, Karen had struggled to make sense of it. She’d wondered whether murder had been the point and the uncovering of the bike merely an excuse to persuade the victim to dig his own grave. It seemed far-fetched.

  In her experience, far-fetched happened more often than was plausible.

  But walking often cleared up the intractable, the intransigent and the implausible. Following the track under the moonlight, she realised what had eluded her earlier. Sometimes, Karen thought, Jason was not the only numpty in the HCU.

  She stopped walking and took out her phone. She pulled up the crime scene photos, sliding her fingers over the screen to enlarge one section. The first Indian, in all its glory. The detail that had slipped away from her previously was clear, even though at that magnification the focus was slightly blurred. She summoned up the images of the second bike, the one that had been exposed to the elements.

  Karen peered at the screen, aware that the peaty detritus on the bike might make her task impossible. If so, she’d have to wait for morning and check it out in person. But she needn’t have worried. The evidence of what she thought she’d remembered was in front of her eyes.

  The leather panniers on the bikes were each secured with a pair of buckled leather straps. On the first bike, the one that had apparently been untouched since its burial, the straps were fastened.

  On the second bike, they hung loose.

  24

  1944 – Antwerp; Wester Ross

  As he’d expected, it had been the Canadians who liberated Antwerp in the end. Arnie Burke handed himself over to them; he was debriefed by a major in Army Intelligence and told he’d be passed back down the line to the Americans in a day or two. He wasn’t sure how easy it would be to get back to Antwerp once he’d been exfiltrated; it left him with a dilemma. Leave his loot in its hiding place and hope nobody would stumble over it, or take it while he had the chance and risk being rumbled when he returned to the fold?

  He decided a bird in the hand was better than two in a hole in the wall. Early one morning, as dawn was gradually revealing the river and the city behind it, he walked out of his billet and made his way back to the obscure backyard where he’d stashed the black velvet bags. Working quickly, he freed the brick facing and found what he’d come for. He had a money belt fastened round his waist and he slipped the bags inside.

  Back at the school gymnasium the Canadians had taken over, he took his kitbag into the toilet cubicle and made a slit in the lining. He fed the bags through the gap and flattened their contents against the bottom of the holdall. If you were really looking for contraband, you might find them. But a casual search would come up clean.

  As it turned out, by the time he got back to an American unit a week later, nobody had a spare moment to give a shit. He could probably have driven in on a Wehrmacht motorbike and sidecar and not raised an eyebrow. Well, maybe that was an exaggeration, but not much of one. He had to tell his story all over again to a US Army Intelligence lieutenant; it resulted in him being bought bottle after bottle of strong Trappist beer that evening.

  The morning after, his head splitting and his stomach roiling, he was told he was being sent back to Scotland, where he’d trained for his fieldwork ahead of Antwerp. ‘We’ve got some guys up there who could use your experience in the field. We might have the Krauts on the run, but there’s still the Japs to finish off in the Pacific. You know yourself, the Brits’ve got a great training operation up there. A few weeks in the Highlands and then we’ll ship you home,’ a pugnacious captain told him.

  A choppy crossing of the Channel then an interminable train journey crammed into a cattle truck full of paras who hadn’t seen hot water in a while. Finally, at some godforsaken windswept station in the dead centre of nowhere, a Jeep turned up driven by a hard-bitten GI who didn’t want to chew the fat. An hour later, Arnie was dropped off at every American’s idea of a fairytale castle. Grey granite, turrets on every corner, a massive door you could have marched a battalion through. It was on an even grander scale than the hunting lodge where he’d been based while he was learning the tricks of the tradecraft.

  A wiry little terrier of a corporal in a uniform that looked like it had been scavenged from the cast-offs of at least three different regiments led him to a tiny bedroom in the attic. A single bed, a chair and a chest of drawers, but it felt like paradise to Arnie. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to sleep without the low thrum of fear in his chest. Nobody was going to burst into this room to denounce him; no stray bullet was going to cut him down as he went about his business; no bombs were going to blow up his world.

  For the next ten weeks, he worked with the Brits, giving potential field agents the benefit of his experiences. It was easy on the nerves and Arnie began to feel more like the man he used to be before he’d found himself living on a knife-edge. His old self-confidence grew by the day and he couldn’t wait to get back to America and start the new life that the contents of his velvet bags would give him.

  And then things got complicated. He was given a date for shipping out. A berth on a US Navy supply ship that was returning materiel that was no longer needed in Europe. Which was great news, except that he heard from one of his new friends in the military police that there were stringent searches in place for anyone travelling on the ship. ‘There’s been too many stories about looting,’ he’d said. ‘Nobody cared when it was just the odd German pistol or Iron Cross, but some guys have been pushing their luck. Some dumb fuck in Signals was caught with a Rembrandt in the bottom of his kitbag – he’d sliced it out of its frame in some rich bastard’s house in Brussels, thought he could ship it home and make a killing.’

  That evening, he retrieved the velvet bags and amalgamated their contents into a single package. He borrowed a bike and rode down to the quayside on Loch Ewe where preparations for loading were under way. Arnie hadn’t come this far to be frustrated by a bunch of self-righteous bureaucrats. He needed to find a way to get his package on board. Once they were out in the Atlantic, he’d figure out how to retrieve it.

  He walked briskly among the newly redundant paraphernalia of a fighting force, looking as if he had business there. All the while, he was studying the ship, scanning the cargo, calculating possibilities. It was soon clear he wasn’t going to be able to sneak aboard and stash the bag. He’d almost given up hope of a
solution when he reached the last row of items. Right at the back were a pair of brand-new Indian Scout motorcyles. They looked as if they’d never been driven. The paintwork was pristine, the tyres without a trace of dirt. Each bike had a pair of panniers fastened over the rear wheel.

  Arnie looked around, checking nobody was interested in him. Then he crouched by one of the bikes, opened a stiff leather strap and dropped the bulging black velvet bag inside. In thirty-six hours, he’d be setting sail for America, his future secure in the hold of the ship.

  He cycled back to the castle, not caring about the hills. What were a few hills to a man who was going to scale mountains?

  25

  2018 – Wester Ross

  Karen expanded the image on her laptop screen then clicked between the two. ‘Do you see what I see?’ she demanded.

  Jason, who had never been what might be described as a morning person, burned his mouth on the hot coffee and winced. ‘Ow!’

  Karen flicked between the two screens again. ‘Come on, Jason.’

  ‘One set of panniers is buckled up and the other one isnae,’ he sighed. ‘So it looks like you were right, it was never the bike they were after. But it doesn’t take us any further forward, does it? I mean, there’s no way of knowing what they were looking for. Or who put it there. Or even if it was there at all.’

  Karen leaned back in her chair and stared out at the sea. ‘I think there was definitely something there. Otherwise both bikes would have been excavated.’

  ‘Unless it was all a plot to get the victim to dig his own grave.’ Jason looked eager.