by Val McDermid
Now the evening stretched before her with nothing to interrupt her research into Shirley O’Shaughnessy, the American who had taken possession of Joey Sutherland’s camper van three months after he had apparently disappeared. She’d told Jason to hold fire until they had more information, but that had mostly been because even the most cursory scan of the Google search results had indicated that investigating Shirley O’Shaughnessy was going to take them places where nobody would welcome their interest.
Karen re-ran her search and assessed the results. She settled on a major profile that had been run by one of the glossy magazines that prided itself on intelligent interviews with women who were movers and shakers in their very different fields. It dated from the previous autumn, so she expected it to be relatively up to date as well as wide-ranging.
HOUSE CAPTAIN
India Chandler meets the woman who may have the answers to the boomerang generation.
I met property tycoon Shirley O’Shaughnessy in her latest home – a penthouse duplex perched above the bustling heart of picture-postcard Edinburgh. The vast windows of her living space have stunning views of all the Scottish capital’s classic landmarks – the castle, the Scott monument, the random cluster on Calton Hill, the grand Balmoral Hotel looming over Waverley station. But in the distance, we also look north across the Georgian grid of the New Town towards some of the city’s less attractive residential areas. For underneath the glamorous skirts of the Athens of the North are some very shabby shoes.
That’s something Shirley is determined to change. She’s spent twenty years in the property development business and to celebrate that anniversary, she’s announced a collaboration with the Scottish government that she believes will revolutionise the lives of countless people.
She’s about to embark on a remarkable building programme aimed not at the luxury market but at the people towards the bottom of the housing ladder. First-time buyers. Families who want somewhere decent to rent at a price they can afford. Young single people who want to make a home of their own. Homeless people who want to find a way off the streets.
We sat at a Philippe Starck Darkside table with matching chairs and sipped a light and fragrant Speyside malt whisky as Shirley explained her philosophy. ‘My grandfather always said it was a gift to know when enough was enough. And I realised a while back that, you know what? I have enough. It was time to change the axis of my business away from purely making profit to spreading the good fortune I’ve had in life.’
Shirley may have had good fortune, but she’s mostly worked for it. There was no available silver spoon for her infant mouth. She was born in Milwaukee, where her father worked on the production line in the Harley Davidson factory. In a terrible irony, he died in an accident on the freeway, riding one of the very bikes he’d helped to build. It was only weeks before Shirley’s third birthday.
‘My grandfather drove down to Milwaukee the very next day and took us back with him to Hamtramck in Michigan. He was head of security at the Dodge automobile plant there. It sounds grand, but really it wasn’t much. He should have been so much more, but escaping a blue-collar background took more luck than ever came his way. But he worked hard and he saved hard, so when he died, his legacy was to give me a great start in life.’
Shirley’s grandfather’s legacy had an impact in more than material terms. He was the reason she chose to go to university in Scotland. ‘My grandfather was stationed in the Highlands during the war—’
Karen drew her breath in sharply. Was this – could this be where the seeds of Joey Sutherland’s death had been sown?
‘—and he said it was the most beautiful part of the world he’d ever visited. And he’d been all over Europe during the war, so he reckoned he knew what he was talking about. When I was a teenager, he told me he’d put enough aside for me to come to Scotland to study. The tragedy is that he died before he got to see me graduate.’
Shirley took a degree in business studies at Napier University in Edinburgh, spending her days on the Craiglockhart Campus whose buildings had been used in the First World War as a convalescent home for shell-shocked soldiers, including the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The modern reimagining of the space was something that excited Shirley.
‘Growing up in America, we don’t have that same sense of architectural heritage. We tend to tear things down and start afresh. And that’s good in some ways. But it’s also important to find ways of making useful what’s already in place. Craiglockhart was the first real practical demonstration I’d had of that principle.’
Inspired by that and by her desire to do something literally constructive with the money her grandfather had left her, during her second year at university Shirley went along to a property auction and bought a dilapidated Victorian villa overlooking the Leith Links park and spent all her spare time for a year restoring and repairing it.
‘It was a real challenge,’ she said. ‘My grandfather was good with his hands and he brought me up to be the same. But I had to learn your British plumbing and electrical systems from scratch. I did most of the work myself, apart from the roof.’ She grinned, revealing an impish twinkle. ‘I had to hire a bunch of guys to do that.’
What was the hardest part of the project?’
‘Living in a Winnebago through an Edinburgh winter,’ she said with a shiver. ‘I’d ploughed all my money into the development. I had to move out of the student residences after one term because I couldn’t afford the rent. So I parked the van in the tiny backyard and lived there. I have never been so cold, not even in the depths of a Midwest winter!’
But at the end of it, Shirley had something to show for all her work. She’d chosen her location well. She sold the house for more than double what she’d paid for it as a wreck. And she was on her way.
Her next purchase was a pair of 1930s semis in a quiet residential suburb. They’d been badly damaged in a fire and one of the roofers who’d worked for Shirley in Leith tipped her off that the insurance company was looking to offload them cheaply. Again she worked her magic and again she made a serious profit.
Looking at her today at 45, it’s hard to imagine her in hard hat and overalls, digging a drain or rewiring a Georgian townhouse. She’s elegant in a classic Armani trouser suit and Pantanetti Chelsea boots. Her hair is cut in a blunt bob – ‘Only my hairdresser Sandro knows how much of my blonde is still real,’ she jokes. She has the kind of natural look that takes a great deal of art to achieve. ‘Part of me resents the need to look a particular way so that people will take me seriously,’ she admitted. ‘But part of me quite enjoys making the most of myself.’
And that’s what Shirley has been doing for the last twenty years. By the time she’d completed her business degree – ‘I got a 2:1,’ she said. ‘I kind of felt I’d let my grandfather down by not getting a first, but my mother told me to quit feeling sorry for myself because he’d have been just as proud of my business success’ – she’d set up a fully fledged property company, City SOS Construction. The week after she finished her final exams, she rented an office and hired her core staff.
‘My PA and my architect are still with me. I’d be lost without them. We’ve grown up in the business together, from small renovation projects to warehouse redevelopments and major new build sites, like the one you’re sitting in now. From the outside, this still looks like a grand Victorian building. But that’s only a façade. The whole of the interior has been built from scratch, to modern standards, using the best of contemporary materials.’
Her empire has grown steadily, but the recent housing crisis has convinced her she needs to alter her angle of approach to the business. ‘It’s genuinely tragic that so many people are condemned to living in places where it’s impossible to build any kind of life. So I’ve come up with a plan that offers a series of new possibilities. And I’m happy to say that here in Scotland, where I’ve made my home, we’ve got a government with the imagination to embrace that.’
Shirley opened he
r Mac Air to reveal some of her plans. First up is a development of shipping containers transformed into compact homes. They’re stacked four high around a central courtyard. ‘This will occupy a brownfield site that used to be a machine parts factory. Sixteen separate homes, each with a bedroom, living room, shower room and kitchen.’
She clicked on a thumbnail and showed me a gallery of interior shots. They had a surprising air of roominess. ‘These are forty-foot containers, so they’re actually quite spacious once they’re kitted out. Everything’s modular, so they’ll be let at a very affordable rental. We’re planning on rolling them out throughout Scotland, from big cities to smaller towns. Wherever they’re needed. Which right now is pretty much everywhere.’
Another window opened on a three-storey square block, the exterior painted in earth tones with highlights in primary colours. ‘This is a purpose-built block with twelve two-bedroom flats in it. These will be sold to first-time buyers and they’ll have covenants forbidding their owners from letting them out. Again, we’re expecting to construct quite a few of these, mostly in our cities and big towns.’
Yet another window showed a former office block, all sixties concrete and metal window frames. ‘You can just see a corner of that, peeping out from behind the car park over there.’ She pointed over to her left, to the ugly top corner of the building. ‘We’re going to transform that into studio flats. We’re working with charities that support the homeless and ex-service personnel, and this building will be used to house people who need to get a toehold back into normal life. There’ll be a gym and a library – the First Minister is very keen on the value of reading – and a couple of other communal spaces. This shows what you can achieve with buildings that nobody else wants any more.’
She grinned and chinked her glass against mine. ‘And this is only the beginning.’
Karen pushed the laptop away from her. ‘Oh shit,’ she said to the night sky. ‘I’m taking on Mother fucking Teresa.’
45
2018 – Edinburgh
Karen had arranged to meet Jason at the end of his street. She wanted to brief him on Shirley O’Shaughnessy outside the office where there were no disloyal ears to listen in on their conversation. Together they caught a bus to the top of Leith Walk and cut across St Andrew Square to Dishoom for Kejriwal – spicy cheese on toast with a couple of eggs. ‘And two side orders of bacon,’ Karen insisted. ‘My treat.’
‘I’ve never been here before,’ Jason said, checking out the Bombay-style Iranian café that had been reinvented for a very different cultural landscape. Bentwood chairs and wooden screens, a conscious nod to the past, not least in the shape of tributes to the Scottish geographer and town planner Patrick Geddes, who’d spent the early 1920s in Bombay. ‘Very historical. It’s a bit different from your usual Indian.’
‘So’s the food,’ Karen said. ‘But listen. I didn’t drag you up here so we could sit and blether about the great days of the Raj. I wanted to tell you what I’ve found out about Shirley O’Shaughnessy.’
‘I thought we were waiting till we—’
‘I know. But I was at a loose end last night and I was still raging from the Dog Biscuit, so I needed something to take my mind off that.’
He nodded, resigned. ‘OK, boss. You think it was the sergeant that grassed you up to the ACC?’
‘Unless it was you?’ She gave him a steady look, but when she saw he was flushing with genuine hurt, she shook her head and grinned. ‘Don’t be daft, Jason, of course I know it wasn’t you.’
‘I would never … Honest.’ He was painfully earnest. ‘Not after what you’ve done for me. Plus, you know, I respect you.’
Karen felt guilty; sometimes she forgot how thin his skin was in unexpected areas. ‘I know. Anyway. Here’s what I found out.’ She gave him a résumé of the key points in the magazine article she’d found.
‘She doesn’t sound much like any kind of murderer we’ve ever had dealings with before,’ Jason said dubiously. ‘They’re not usually pals with the First Minister.’
He had a point. ‘And that’s why we need to get this nailed down at all four corners. I read everything I could find online, and there’s one or two interesting wee nuggets that might be worth pursuing. I tracked down another interview, from about ten years ago when she was doing her first big development along the coast near Dunbar. An estate of little boxes between the A1 and the railway line. I suppose if your job’s in Edinburgh, they’re handy for the commute. So this journalist was asking about how our Shirley got started and she talked the talk about the winter in the camper van.
‘But she said a bit more about how much she’d loved the van. She bought it, she said, from a small ad in the Evening News. She wasn’t expecting much but it turned out to be quite the luxury van as these things go. What we need to do is find that small ad, see if her story checks out. If it doesn’t – well, we’ve caught her out in a lie before we even get started.’
Jason looked gloomy. He knew that ‘we’ meant him. But he was a simple man and the arrival of his breakfast was enough to lift his spirits. ‘OK,’ he said, cutting into his cheese on toast. ‘But I’ve still got that Kenny Pascoe research to finish.’
‘Where are you up to?’
‘I’ve got the address where he was living when he died. Percy Cottage, Warkworth, Northumberland. The death certificate gave TB as the cause of death. And I managed to get somebody at the Northumberland County Archives to check out the census returns for that address and it looks like his sister Evlyn lived at the same address right up to the 2011 census. Never got married. She lived there all by herself. She was on the voters roll at that address till 2015.’
Karen sighed. No family to be the repository of stories about Uncle Kenny and the motorbikes. ‘Is she dead, then?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’ve still to find out. I haven’t been able to track down a death certificate.’
‘So she might still be alive?’
‘She might be. But I don’t know where.’
‘OK. Leave that for now, and concentrate on finding that small ad for the van.’
Evidently not even the spicy cheese was compensation for that prospect. Glum-faced, Jason asked, ‘Where do you think they keep the archive?’
‘I don’t know if they’ve got a physical archive. But there’s an online archive for British newspapers. You can search date and subject. You’ll have to plough through all the ads for a camper van or a motor home or a caravan for the three months from Invercharron games to the date DVLA registered the van to her. I know it’s the kind of tedious job I should be dumping on McCartney, but I don’t trust him to do it right.’
Even the Mint understood that was a compliment. He smiled as he chewed, which wasn’t a pretty sight. He swallowed and said, ‘If it’s all online, do you want me to go home and do it there? Out of his road?’
‘That’s not a bad idea. And I’ll deal with the weasel when he turns up. And in the meantime—’ She signalled to the waiter. ‘I’m going to have another cup of chai.’
Karen wasn’t someone who spent a lot of time thinking about food, but eating well always left her in a better frame of mind. So she managed to find a tight-lipped smile for McCartney when he arrived at Gayfield Square shortly after her, juggling three cartons of coffee. He looked wary and tired. She hoped it was because his conscience was bothering him but thought it was more likely to be his wife or kids giving him a hard time.
‘Where’s the Boy Wonder this morning?’ He passed Karen a coffee and looked around, as if Jason would emerge from under a desk to claim his drink.
‘Out and about on a wee job for me,’ she said blandly. ‘If there’s an extra coffee going, I’ll take it off your hands.’
He sighed, gave her the extra brew and went to his desk. He opened his laptop then whistled between his front teeth. ‘Bloody hell. Miracles will never cease.’ The sound of fingers tapping keys, heavy-handed and staccato. ‘Have you got some serious blackmail material on the
Gartcosh geeks?’
‘How?’ Karen didn’t turn her eyes from her own screen.
‘I’ve got the full set of DNA results through from all those red Rover interviews we did. Unbe-fucking-lievable. Do you know how long it usually takes to get DNA back from the labs? And that’s on live cases, where somebody actually cares what happens.’
‘People care about what happens in our cases too. The passage of time doesn’t diminish the importance of getting answers.’
‘I know, I know. This bastard’s victims have been living with what he did to them for the best part of thirty years. And Kay McAfee’s parents have only had a few weeks to get used to the idea of it finally killing her. But still, MIT never gets results this fast.’
Karen shrugged. ‘I think some of the techies feel the same way I do. When people have waited years for answers, you shouldn’t make them wait a single day longer than is absolutely necessary. So they do have a tendency to bump us up the queue when nobody’s looking.’
He slurped his coffee. ‘I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong. I’m just amazed.’
‘Any joy?’
‘Hold on a minute … ’ A silence that felt longer than it ought to be. ‘Bloody hell! We’ve got something.’
Karen was on her feet and round behind McCartney almost before he’d finished speaking. She peered over his shoulder at the screen where he was pointing to a section of the results page he’d downloaded. ‘Barry Plummer. He’s the Motherwell bed salesman. He wasn’t on our initial list because it wasn’t his car. His uncle taught him to drive in it. Gordon Chalmers, the guy from Portpatrick that died out in Spain. Shit.’
‘And you thought this was a waste of time,’ Karen said, with a lot less rancour than she felt. ‘Turns out it might not have been such a daft idea after all.’