by Val McDermid
‘And I should have paid more attention when you told me what Willow Henderson had said. I should have seen the signs and warned Logan myself. This is not just about you, Karen. Like I said, we all end up on the wrong side of history sooner or later in this job. All you can do is put it behind you and get on with the next case.’
Karen sighed. ‘The next case has a whole different set of problems,’ she said, thinking about Hamish Mackenzie.
‘Aye, but they can wait for tomorrow morning. You never know what’ll be waiting for you.’
Karen gave a dry laugh. ‘The way my luck’s going? I’m not sure I want to find out.’
60
2018 – Edinburgh
It had been one of those nights when sleep eluded Karen. It had started auspiciously enough. She’d been bone weary by the time Jimmy had dropped her off at home, and she’d crashed out like a felled tree as soon as she hit the mattress. But it didn’t last. Just after three, an alarm bell sounded in her dream and she surfaced, groggy and disorientated. She rolled over and tried to drift back into sleep but her brain whirred and raced, disobedient to all her attempts to lull it into unconsciousness. In spite of her best intentions, Hamish Mackenzie kept insinuating himself into her thoughts.
She gave up around quarter to four and pulled on a pair of jeans and yesterday’s shirt. A cup of rhubarb and ginger tea, then she was out on the streets. Not so long ago, she’d have found a group of Syrian men huddled round a brazier under a railway bridge. But they had the café now, and the denizens of the night were either furtively avoiding any eye contact or too tired, travelling to or from work, to care. That was fine, though. There was nothing to disturb her mental review of the Joey Sutherland case. Slowly, a strategy was taking shape.
She zigzagged through back lanes and side streets up from the shore to the broad artery of Queen Street then walked back towards the office, the private gardens raucous with birdsong on one side, imposing Georgian buildings on the other. The first tram of the day was leaving the terminus on York Place as she passed, carrying a handful of bleary-eyed workers out towards the airport. She stopped on the corner of Picardy Place, considering. She could go home, shower and have breakfast. Or she could sneak into work before the station properly woke up and get the jump on the day. Amy Shulman might have turned up some information for her overnight. The downside of that was there was nowhere open for coffee. Even Starbucks wouldn’t open its doors for another hour.
‘I am not an addict,’ Karen said out loud. ‘I don’t need coffee to think.’ She almost convinced herself, and turned down the hill. As she rounded the corner into Gayfield Square, a car nipped out of the police station and down the hill away from her. It nudged her with its familiarity, but she couldn’t place it. At least if it was the Dog Biscuit, she was heading in the right direction, as far as Karen was concerned.
She walked down the echoing main corridor. This was the dead hour in a police station. The night shift were skulking out of sight, trying not to catch any new jobs this close to closing time, and the day shift teams hadn’t wandered in with their bacon rolls and tabloids yet. Nobody around to bother her or give her the hard stare over what had happened on their doorstep.
Karen logged on to her email, trying to keep optimism at bay. The way things had been running lately, she’d be surprised if Amy Shulman had even started looking, never mind come up with any results.
She was gratifyingly wrong. The first item in her inbox was an email from the Milwaukee detective. With attachments. Karen snapped it open and read the message.
Hi Detective Pirie
Well, your inquiry really intrigued me. We don’t really get the opportunity in my squad to do cold case investigations so it’s interesting to me to see how an expert goes about it.
First, your Shirley O’Shaughnessy. She was real easy to find. I attach a copy of her birth certificate. You’ll see from it that her mother was born Clare Gerardine Burke. She was unmarried but Shirley’s father is named as James O’Shaughnessy and the baby took his name. Given that the grandfather took Clare and Shirley to Hamtramck after James’s death, I thought it might be worth checking with my colleagues in Michigan to see if we could get a lead on Clare or her father.
So, turns out Clare was born in 1951 in Hamtramck. (Scan attached of birth certificate.) Her father’s name was Arnold Burke. You told me the granddaughter supposedly started her business with a legacy from him, which kind of necessitates him being dead. So I checked that out too and he died in November 1994. (Scan of death certificate attached.)
I was starting to get interested by this point. So I called the courthouse in Hamtramck and asked if they had a probate copy of Arnold Burke’s will. And hallelujah, they did. (Scan attached.) As you’ll see, he left his house and his car to his daughter, Clare. And he left his beloved granddaughter $20,000 to support her through her studies. And there was a weird line in the will: ‘If the aforementioned Shirley O’Shaughnessy finds the Indians, I bequeath them to her too.’ Now, I have no idea what that means, and if you do, I would be obliged if you would put my curiosity to rest!
Like I said, you got me intrigued and so did that bequest. So I called the local library and found me a friendly librarian who checked the newspaper files to see whether Arnold Burke had merited any kind of obituary or death notice. Lo and behold, there’s the connection to your jurisdiction. They sent me a copy and I’ve attached that too.
I hope this helps you on your way. I’d sure like to hear how it all turns out.
Best regards
Amy Shulman (Detective)
Karen had to read it twice to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. Amy Shulman had come up trumps and she dashed off a quick email to tell her so, promising to keep her abreast of developments. Then she downloaded and printed out the attachments and settled down to work her way through them.
The birth and death certificates offered no more insights than Amy had already noted. But the obituary was a different matter.
ARNOLD BURKE (September 7, 1920 – November 7, 1994)
Arnie Burke, whose death was announced this week, was a familiar figure to anyone who worked at the old Dodge plant in Hamtramck. Arnie was head of security at the plant from 1948 until he retired in 1980, and he was known for running a tight ship. He was a keen target pistol competitor, winning many trophies throughout the state.
In later years, he developed an interest in the history of Michigan’s automobile industry and he ran a local group in Hamtramck who collected materials about the factories and recorded oral accounts of people who had worked there over the years. Mr Burke was a regular on WDTK radio where he would take listeners on a trip down memory lane to the early days of automobile construction.
He was born in Saginaw, the middle son of Agnes and Patrick Burke. He was working as a car mechanic when war broke out in 1941 and he volunteered for the US Army. He shipped out to Europe as soon as he’d completed his training. He never spoke in detail about his war service, except to say that he’d been deployed behind enemy lines. His mother was French and she taught him to speak the language fluently as a boy. His family have since revealed that Mr Burke was in fact recruited by the OSS and worked undercover in Antwerp, Belgium, where he was a key operative in combating the Nazi occupation. He was later decorated for his wartime activities.
After the Canadian Army liberated the city, Mr Burke was exfiltrated to Scotland, where he was stationed briefly in the Highlands in a training role before shipping home in 1945. His daughter Clare, who survives him, said, ‘He wasn’t a boastful man, but from the little he did say about his war service, we all understood he’d done some pretty scary things. I was very proud of him.’
Mr Burke is also survived by his granddaughter Shirley, who is studying in Scotland in a tribute to her grandfather’s love of the country.
The obituary finished with details of the memorial service. The details were scant, it was true, but they filled a vital hole in the jigsaw of the case that Karen was slowly as
sembling. Arnie Burke had brought something back from Europe, something that had ended up in the panniers of one of the Indians that Austin Hinde and his friend had buried in a Highland peat bog. For some reason, he’d never recovered it. But he’d left enough clues for his granddaughter to identify the hiding place.
She’d got that far in her reasoning when Jason walked in. He nearly dropped his bacon roll at the sight of her. ‘How come you’re here?’ he blurted out.
She gave him a mock-severe look. ‘I work here.’
‘I know, but it’s barely the back of seven. You’re not usually here this early.’
‘Neither are you,’ she pointed out, not unreasonably.
‘I wanted to write up my report properly. It was going to be a nice surprise. To cheer you up.’ He looked down at the floor, disappointed.
Karen’s attention quickened. ‘You got something?’
Jason nodded. ‘I did. You were right. She did garage it for the three months between the last sighting of Joey and her officially taking ownership of it.’
‘I want to hear all about it. And then you need to hear all about what’s come in from America. We’re cooking, Jason.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘We deserve a proper breakfast. Fuck the expense, let’s go across to the Glasshouse and pillage their buffet.’
‘What? A hotel breakfast? And we’re not even out of town?’
‘This has been such a shit week, Jason, I feel like we deserve a wee treat. We’ll swap stories and then we’ve got plotting to do.’
61
2018 – Edinburgh
The dining room was practically empty when Karen and Jason arrived, so they were given a table with a grandstand view of Calton Hill. Jason looked around in undisguised delight. ‘I’ve never been here before,’ he said.
‘I stayed here with Phil one time. It was his cousin’s wedding and we didn’t want to try to get back to Fife afterwards.’ The memory gave Karen pause, but she realised all at once that the sharp pain of early grief had been finally blunted by time. She could enjoy the sweetness of memories now as well as the bitterness.
Jason scoured the menu. ‘Can I get kippers?’ he demanded, reduced by excitement to a child on an outing.
Seeing the array of food, Karen remembered she hadn’t eaten a proper meal for at least two days. Snacking on the run was all very well, but she was going to make the most of this opportunity. ‘Have what you like. I’m going to hit the buffet first, then I’m having a full Scottish. We’ll eat and then talk,’ she said decisively, pushing her chair back and making for the continental side of the buffet.
Sometime later, they both acknowledged they’d hit their limit. Jason eyed with regret the remaining half of a Scotch morning roll filled with Austrian smoked cheese and hardboiled egg. ‘I don’t think I can manage that. Do you think they’d notice if I wrapped it in a napkin and stuck it in my pocket for later?’
Karen rolled her eyes. ‘Really?’
‘My mum always says, “Waste not, want not, pick it up,”’ he said defensively.
‘I thought that was The Pretenders? So, tell me what you found out.’
Jason looked around as surreptitiously as a two-year-old and shoved the roll and napkin in his jacket pocket. ‘I had a brainwave,’ he said. ‘I thought maybe instead of looking at caravan sites, where you’d notice if somebody wasn’t around at their van, maybe it would make more sense to garage it someplace that sells them and rents them out.’
‘That was a brainwave.’ She almost meant it. ‘And was that where you found something to cheer me up?’
‘Ta-da,’ Jason said, producing an envelope. He handed it to Karen with a flourish.
She opened it to find the invoice he’d brought back from Bellfield Mobile Homes, carefully encased in a plastic sleeve. She read it attentively, noting the date. ‘Ya dancer,’ she said softly. ‘At the very least, she’s got some serious questions to answer. But not quite yet, I think. We need more ammo before we pull in someone with her connections.’
‘If you say so, boss. So what did you find out?’
She filled him in on what she’d learned from Amy Shulman. ‘I don’t know what or why, but I think Arnie Burke put something in those bike panniers for safekeeping. Maybe he thought they were going to be shipped back to America like so much of their materiel. But somehow, Alice Somerville’s granddad and his pal got their hands on the bikes and buried them. I’m presuming they didn’t know there was anything hidden in them. And for whatever reason, Arnie couldn’t get his hands on them at the time.’
‘So why did he not come back for them later?’ Jason asked.
‘Maybe he tried. Tried and failed. Alice and Will couldn’t find them last summer when they went searching, don’t forget.’
‘But if Arnie couldn’t find them, how come Shirley did?’
It was a good point. ‘I don’t know, Jason. Maybe Arnie got better information later on, when he was too old to go digging in West Highland peat bogs. So he passed it on to Shirley and told her to go and claim her inheritance.’
He nodded. ‘That makes sense.’
‘Arnie was in Antwerp,’ Karen said thoughtfully. ‘What do we know about Antwerp?’
Jason looked blank. Then his face cleared. ‘Royal Antwerp FC were the first registered Belgian football club,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a loan partnership with Manchester United.’
Karen groaned. ‘For fuck’s sake, Jason. How is that anything to do with our case?’
He flushed. ‘Well, it isnae, boss, but you asked what I know about Antwerp and that’s all I know about Antwerp.’
She sighed. ‘Fair enough.’
‘So what do you know about Antwerp?’
‘I know one thing, and one thing only, and it’s not about football. Think about something you get in Belgium that’s very small and portable but very valuable.’
An expression of panic crossed Jason’s face. ‘It’s not chocolate, is it?’
She laughed. ‘No, it’s not chocolate. Diamonds, Jason. Diamonds. Antwerp is one of the major diamond-dealing centres in the world.’
He frowned. ‘OK. But how does that fit in with the bikes and Joey Sutherland and all that?’
‘We know now that Arnie Burke was an undercover operative for the American Army in the Second World War in Belgium. The diamond dealers were mostly Jewish, back then. Probably the majority of them ended up dead in the camps and I bet the Nazis helped themselves to as many of their stones as they could get their hands on. Is it not possible that when the city fell to the Allies, Arnie was well enough in with the Germans to get his hands on some of the diamonds they’d looted?’ Karen spoke slowly, feeling her way as she went.
Jason hesitated, working through her theory till he reached understanding. ‘It makes sense. So you think that he told his granddaughter where to find the goods?’
‘That’s something we might never know, Jason. But however she found out, I think Shirley O’Shaughnessy used Joey Sutherland’s muscle to get her hands on the diamonds. And then she killed him.’
Jason took a gulp of tea and scratched his head. ‘How do we know she got the diamonds? If there were any diamonds.’
‘Two things,’ Karen said. ‘By that December, she had enough money to buy a house in Leith for cash at an auction.’ Jason was about to speak but she raised a hand to forestall him. ‘She must have had cash because no bank would have loaned that kind of money to a more or less penniless overseas student. So she got the money from somewhere.’
‘That’s one thing,’ he acknowledged. ‘What’s the other?’
‘She only dug up one bike. If she’d not got the diamonds, she’d have dug up both bikes in the search.’
Light dawned. ‘And if she’d dug them both up and not got the diamonds, she wouldn’t have been able to start her business.’
‘Correct.’
Jason poured more tea and stirred two teaspoonfuls of sugar into it, looking pensive. ‘But we don’t know for sure that there really were diamonds.
That’s you guessing, right?’
Karen sighed. ‘Aye, it’s me guessing. But there must have been something. And diamonds are what makes most sense.’
‘But how are we going to find out?’
‘I don’t know. I need to talk to somebody who knows about diamonds.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Jason sounded wary.
‘Two things. I want you to find out where Hamish Mackenzie lived when he was in America. And talk to Ruari Macaulay again, see if you can get a list of names of heavy athletes who were around in 1995 and talk to them. Find out if any of them saw Joey Sutherland after the Invercharron Games in 1995.’
His face grew more cheerful. This was the kind of routine grafting that Jason had learned to do well. ‘What’s the deal with Hamish Mackenzie? I thought we decided he was one of the good guys?’
Karen sighed, her eyes troubled. ‘We have to cover all the bases. So’s we don’t get fooled again. I had a fleeting thought that in spite of what he told us, maybe his grandparents did know about the bikes being buried on their land. For all we know, Arnie Burke could have written to every possible landowner in the area, trying to find out where the bikes were. What if Hamish found out about this and was near enough to make contact? He’d have had to be nearby, I think. He was only a teenager at the time, he wouldn’t have had many resources for long-distance travel. But what if he was the missing link? What if he got a share of Shirley O’Shaughnessy’s loot, and that’s how he funded his first coffee shop all those years later?’
Jason’s mouth fell open and his eyes widened. ‘You think he’s involved? I thought you liked him?’
‘I did. I do. But that doesn’t mean he’s not in this up to his oxters. He said they moved to America when his dad got a job at Stanford. But maybe he didn’t go to school in California. Just check it out, Jason. Set my mind at rest.’ Because she knew he’d already told her one lie. She needed to be sure that wasn’t a distraction from other, deeper untruths.