by Caro Ramsay
‘Well, the baby wasn’t where it should have been.’
‘It wasn’t my case,’ said Costello, quietly, knowing how inadequate it sounded.
‘Maybe it should be now. You should talk to her friend.’
‘Who.’
Libby ignored the question. ‘She had been talking about changing her job, and that she had come across something more lucrative, much more lucrative.’
‘What, cutting out the middle man, sorry woman, and keeping all the money for herself?’
Libby smiled. ‘Well, she didn’t get that far. She got killed instead. When are you seeing your pathologist next? Maybe you should talk to him.’
‘I will, can I keep these?’ Costello asked mischievously but Libby put the pictures in her desk drawer. ‘Those photographs are Police Scotland property.’
‘What photographs?’ asked Libby with a face that wouldn’t melt butter. ‘And while you are about it, can you find out what bastard did that to her and then let me know.’
‘I will find out what happened to her, the rest goes to higher power than mine.’
‘I am a higher power than you.’ Libby stood up and looked out the window, and was quiet for a few moments. The baby crawling on the floor started mouthing a bubble-blowing tune. ‘I grew up without my mother. I don’t know … how had she looked? Alive? Tell me, can you still see her, in your mind’s eye.’
‘Yes, I do. Clear as day,’ Costello answered honestly.
‘We are not so different.’ Then she was her animated self again. ‘Here’s the number of somebody to speak to. Call her Suzy and she’ll be happy to talk to you. Watch yourself going down the stairs, they get slippery when wet.’
Valerie Abernethy was drunk, but she was a functioning drunk so nobody really noticed, or if they did notice they didn’t care. The lies were about to start now, she could do the right thing or the wrong thing. Archie had advised her that she had to do the right thing for her and not for anybody else. It was her life. OK, so she had totally misled him as to what the issue was, but the end result was the same. Since her dad died, she had become to rely on Archie. Funny how life seemed when there was no backbone to it, no Dad, no Mum. Valerie had woken up the day after her dad’s death to realize that she was now the responsible generation. She had been drunk most of that day.
Archie never saw it. He never saw anything bad in his god-daughter and she gave him a false impression of how happy she was. Archie thought he knew how much Grieg had hurt her yet he had nothing to do with the black state of her mind.
Was it a common thing in the world today to shape or ruin a life by the pressing of one button? When Fat Boy had been deployed, its mission to wreak havoc on the population of Hiroshima, did the person who pressed the button have any last-minute little doubts, at the final point when all the talking and decision-making that had gone on before, came down to the pressing of one button?
One look in the papers told her that on Facebook one status, or comment, like a photo could spark off cyberbullying that could lead to suicide. One click could start a petition that could bring down a government. Another click could start a war.
There was a message on her phone. Her heart quickened when she read it. This was what she had been waiting seven months for.
She would be happy. She quickly typed a reply and pressed send, feeling weirdly free of the stress ball that had been gathering in her stomach over the last few weeks.
She closed the phone and put it into her bag. She went upstairs into her bathroom and looked at her face. No evidence of her fall last night. She took a few mouthfuls of vodka from the bottle she kept in the cabinet. Her face betrayed nothing. No evidence of her problem, the grey ghost that stalked her. The hidden little friend, the beguiling little companion that told her everything would be OK. And how much delusion was possible. How much self-delusion.
She turned sideways and stuck her stomach out. Is that how she would look if she was pregnant?
She’d stop drinking then. She’d have a reason to.
She drank because she was unhappy, if she was happy she wouldn’t drink.
She was the master of self-delusion her entire life. God, her entire life was a delusion – she was here in her six-hundred-thousand pound flat, with her Porsche and her Christian Louboutins. She was a feared prosecutor in court. In reality, she was a single woman who was so devastated at the death of her cat, she had got pissed and passed out on the kitchen floor. Looking closer in the bathroom mirror, she could see her make-up was doing a good job of hiding the bruise on the side of her face, but that too, that face, was a delusion. She had two different faces, one for each world. She had thought that her law degree would be enough in her professional world and that her marriage was enough personally. Both had failed her. Grieg had had an affair with a girl called Tania, Tara, Toni, something like that. She was eight years younger than Valerie. But Valerie had had her affair first, with a cheap bottle of vodka.
Now she didn’t even have Alfred to tell her worries to.
She had tried to save her marriage, saying she would stop drinking and would try an IVF programme but that was a non-starter right from the get go. Her private gynae had sat in that posh office. She could remember the feel of the polished wood of the chair arm under her hands, her fingers were coiling and uncoiling. She knew what he was going to say before he said it, and why he had suggested, pointedly, that she might want to attend her appointment on her own.
You’ve got to stop the drinking.
With all the Bernadette Kissel’s in the world, he had sat there in his posh office and told her that she was unfit to be a mother.
‘You aren’t suitable for the programme?’ Grieg had asked, as she was holding onto the worktop for support. He had asked her to seek help. Her hesitation had been a moment too long. And, though her recollection wasn’t too good – she had been drunk at the time – she was sure that was the moment he had walked into the bedroom and started packing for the first time.
And, she thought, looking at the water as it ran down the sink, that was the last time he had packed.
She turned the tap off and went to pack a suitcase of her own.
Eddie McFadden was settling down to his favourite evening of the week. Thursday nights were for chilling. She was away at the bingo and if he was in luck, she would be out before he came in from work. Then he would nip out the house for special fish and chips with curry sauce, the pea and ham soup that the wife had left him would go to the dog – although sometimes the dog turned his nose up at it. Eddie would scoff his high cholesterol but delicious supper with a hot cup of tea and a whole box of Jaffa cakes. He would spend the night at the computer looking through his photographs, the ones he had taken the weekend before, at his regular haunt, the RSPB reserve at Lochwinnoch. The weather hadn’t been good last time but he had spent a good hour moving from hide to hide. Although these days he was finding the reeds and the water more interesting than the birds although he always had a soft spot for the swans, majestic, beautiful and bloody vicious.
He boiled the kettle again and filled his cup, put an old episode of On The Buses on the TV and settled down, loading the photographs from the memory card onto the hard drive. He clicked through them one by one, deleting all those out of focus or misfires.
It wasn’t unusual for the images to catch something that he himself had not seen. The old adage was true, the camera never lies. When he first saw the ghostly shape in the water, at first he thought it was a dead swan, white and undulating below the surface, caught in the reeds as the slight waves buffered it. Then he thought it was a shadow on the lens on the water or a bright reflection of the moon. Then he noticed its extreme white colour, blanched, devoid of all tone, floating around and seeming to shimmer between the frames. It was difficult to make out any shape. He brushed his salty hands down his cardigan and looked again. Plastic bag? They were so bad for the birds, it made him furious, Castle Semple and the loch were not in the city centre, they were not places tha
t attracted other people’s garbage. This was a nature reserve, people had to know the place was here and drive out or get the train out. People came here because they loved nature or because they canoed or rowed. The kind of people that should respect the place.
He sighed and swore under his breath. Last year there had been boys down there with airguns, taking pot shots at the swans. He’d bloody drown them if he ever caught them. He was a big guy, he could still handle himself.
He clicked on a few frames. The white ghost in the water took on a definite shape and form, bigger than a swan, much bigger. He had the semi-submerged tree trunk to scale it. Was it two swans, wrapped together in death as they were in life? As he focussed he thought he could make out a waist, shoulders. It faded as it sank deeper onto the water like two wings or two arms, or was it all a trick of his mind. But the last photograph confirmed it. He spread his fingers on the screen. He had a good camera, the larger image lost no resolution. He could see wisps of ebony hair across the stark ivory of her cheek, like a doll thrown away in a fit of temper. He looked closer at the detail. Not a doll, not a doll at all.
Anderson wanted some peace and quiet. He had been sitting in his kitchen with a strong cup of black coffee and a pile of toast ladled with butter. On the island in front of him he had the pictures of Gillian Witherspoon and Sally Logan as she was then. He had been studying them for a while, a blank A4 notebook on the worktop beside him, the virgin white page was now full of scribbles.
He had phoned Gerry Stewart. Gillian’s widower seemed happy to hear from him. And had answered his single question with hesitation, and then said, Thank God you asked.
Gillian had been having her shoulder operated on when she died. The pain from the ligamentous injury that she had sustained during her assault.
And the more he flicked through the pictures, the more similarities he saw. He was running his fingers over the pale features of Sally, standing against a white wall, wearing a light-blue paper gown, the camera catching the depth and the scale of her injuries against a flat rule. He wondered if he could talk to her about the noise and …
He shut the file as the kitchen door flew open.
‘Dad, are you going out on a date? Tonight again?’ Claire was insistent, as if she wanted the house to herself. He shouldn’t have stayed out last night. He was overcome with a huge sense of guilt, with no idea why. Should he have told Claire to go out to Brenda’s and spend the night there as he wouldn’t be home?
But he wouldn’t have changed last night at all. It had been such a long time since he had talked like that, drank like that. He had left the car, forgotten and abandoned outside in the mud. He had fallen asleep easily on the sofa at the Braithwaite’s house in front of the log fire that itself was tiring and failing. He had woken up to the smell of bacon sizzling in a pan, the pain that he had thought was angina turned out to be the cat lying on his chest. He had a brisk wash in freezing cold water in the bathroom, bare floorboards and curling wallpaper. He had slipped his anorak on, not wanting to presume that the bacon was for him, then had followed the quiet, low-ceilinged hall back to the kitchen where the smell intensified to a mouth-watering degree. The kitchen was empty, three rashers of bacon lay on the frying pan, a cut roll beside it already buttered, a mug, coffee in the coffee maker. Braithwaite was outside, in the drizzle, anorak on, having a coffee and his bacon roll, his bum perched on the old fence that must have bordered the flower garden at some time. He turned around and gestured to the bacon.
Five minutes later, Anderson too was outside, feeling the light rain on his face. He was ripping apart the bacon roll like he hadn’t eaten for a fortnight, and he knew why pathologists and crime scene officers loved bacon rolls after being at the grisly crime scene. They had a comforting aroma.
He had come home to have a shower and get changed before going late into work and was slightly miffed that nobody seemed to have missed him. Nobody asked where he had been, he could have been in bloody Casualty for all they knew. Or cared.
Then Sally had phoned. He couldn’t say that he wasn’t flattered about the way that conversation had gone. But it wasn’t right, they were not the same two people now that they had been then. Not at all.
So he had gone to work and not concentrated on anything.
It was half eight now and he was lying down on the settee of the big house, trying not to think why the Marmite was out even though Claire hated it, or why Claire might want him to go back out again.
Instead he decided to lie down on the big sofa and have a think about the case. Costello had sent him an email with Laphan’s thoughts on the issue of baby brokering, and his thoughts in a nutshell were that it could be entirely possible and extremely profitable.
Once he had sat down at his desk he had put all his memories of Helena and Sally behind him, and then spent an unfruitful two hours listening to his colleagues in the office, reading over the plans for the new poster girl for the SafeLife campaign, tinkering with it and making suggestions on how they might be able to sell this to Sally. She hadn’t said yes, but she hadn’t said no.
And it was an excuse to see her again.
He had still been in the office when Costello phoned to update him on her visit to Libby Hamilton and that she was following a solid lead. He had been surprised, an email and a phone call. Was it force of habit, a habit that she had not acted on for the previous few months? Or was she taunting him, making him jealous as she ran around, out in the big world doing detective work, then phoning him with clues and asking him what he thought. Or had she sensed that he was jealous of the curry they had all been out for. He was jealous of the meeting she had set up with a prostitute called Suzy.
He was jealous of her.
Libby and Dali had arrived at the same conclusion, one was a woman of utter integrity and the other wrote her own rules. They had both hinted there was baby brokering going on. That was illegal. But more worrying was the abduction of other children.
And Mulholland’s story intrigued him, a pregnant woman in a blue coat had walked down the lane and disappeared. He closed his eyes and imagined the lane with walls on either side. Two doors in the wall of the Old Edwardian, then that wee patch of dirt. There was no back door, no entry to the building or the office building on the lane apart from the lift. He had an invitation to view the security film from the lift but thought it prudent to send Mulholland and Wyngate. They had checked out Wrights Insurance. Did she get picked up in a car? Not with the bollard up. There had been no noise of a motorbike or scooter. There were no outside iron stairs up the building. What about downwards, any basements? He wondered if that had been checked, the floor of the yard? A trapdoor of some sort? He was being fanciful but they had learned a lesson one night on a hill above that long, slow drag known as the Rest and Be Thankful. There could be anything underground.
Curious, he pulled out his phone and typed in the word Grahamston.
The fictional village that lay under Glasgow. It had never really existed surely. The rumours were that it had been abandoned in the 1870s. It was supposed to be buried under the concourse of Glasgow Central Station and to spread westward. And it was a fiction. A mere fiction that had grown up over the years, nothing but whispers and conjecture that had blossomed to fact.
The lane was less than two blocks away from the western edge of where Grahamston was purported to be, go one block further south and there was the river. The river still had old tunnels underneath, right in the heart of the city. The rotundas, now restaurants, were used for turning horse-drawn vehicles back in the day, allowing them to shuttle back and forth.
OK, so he allowed himself that hypothesis. What was going on that warranted a pregnant woman to hide there? The concealment of the birth of a baby.
‘Hello.’ The door opened, a pleasant-looking blonde smiled.
Costello walked into a flat, decorated in every shade of grey, very trendy with a circular settee that nobody could sit in. She couldn’t help herself but look at Suzy’s arms, no t
rack marks. She was clean, she looked healthy. Libby’s punters did not like girls infected with the needle. It was bad for business.
The recent TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale was on the television. Suzy clicked it to silence as she sat down.
‘Suzy?’
‘I know who you are and I know why you are here.’
‘I would like to think that you are talking to me without duress.’ Costello sat down. ‘And that you are free to say what you need to say.’
‘I am, I knew Janet or Sonja as she was known professionally. I knew her quite well in the early days, two years back, we both started out in …’
‘Business together?’ Costello offered
‘Some of the girls do a bit of extra work, to help with their grants, you know. Some men coming into the nightclub want young, bright company, especially if they come from overseas.’
‘I get the picture,’ said Costello, ‘but to my mind you are no better than the girl who ended up with her head bashed in against the side of the skip. You live a risky life.’
‘I am a hostess not a prostitute.’
‘You live a risky life,’ Costello repeated.
‘Janet and I, we were hostessing together at the Red Door, do you know it?’
‘I know it as a knocking shop.’
‘We can earn a lot of money, and I do declare it for tax before you start on that.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’ Costello wondered about the society they lived in. OK to sleep with men for money, not OK to exclude it from the self-assessment tax return.
‘It’s not illegal to work as a hostess,’ Suzy said primly.
‘So I keep hearing. What about Janet?’
‘Janet was there as well, she resented the fact that we had to give some of our earnings over as rent to the …’
‘Management?’ offered Costello.
‘Indeed, and she decided to go out on her own, make more money and the next thing I heard she was working at another nightclub.’
‘What club?’
‘Something like The Pond.’