Ten years ago, this would have been considered early days. Now she was serving under the tyranny of ever-accelerating news cycles, of people hitting refresh on a browser and expecting the story to change from minute to minute. When it didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before the politicos began asking whether the investigation had stalled. Progress wasn’t measured in days any more, but in hours. That was why even she was conscious of having seen the same footage over and over again: cops in hi-viz vests combing the grounds and the woods beyond; the same statements from her and from a spokesman for the Cragruthes estate.
The bank had put forward nobody, wanting their part in it to be quietly buried. Given the recent revelations about former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin taking out a super-injunction to conceal what he was getting up to when he wasn’t flushing billions down the toilet, it was no surprise that his counterparts at the RSB weren’t firing salutes over Hamish Queen’s body.
The interviews with the bank’s delegates and guests were ongoing, but they were all telling the same story. There were no accounts of anybody acting suspiciously or sneaking away during the show. Drink was flowing, and that meant urine would have been too, but there had been toilet breaks between acts. When there are only three rows, and not a lot of leg room, it’s hard for anybody to take their leave without being noticed. And yet there were only thirty-five guests accounted for, including the host and the late Mr Queen, and someone had taken pains to erase the paperwork.
She had gone back and pressed Sir Angus on this. He said he had been sure they were full, though he added that in the past the bank and other clients had booked the full complement of places while keeping one or two free in case they had to add someone at short notice. Plausible enough, but it didn’t explain why somebody had deleted the lists from the Cragruthes computer.
A copy of the final booking emailed to the castle had been requested from the RSB, as the original outgoing version would still be on their system. When it arrived, Catherine suspected it might pose some awkward questions for somebody, and she was going to enjoy asking them.
One of the local officers spoke first, a sandy-haired outdoorsy type she could easily have made a fool of herself over once upon a time.
‘DC Brian Frazer, ma’am,’ he identified himself. ‘We’ve been bracing folk known to be fond of a wee moonlight trek with a gun on them purely for defending themselves from animals. Alibis all round, which is to be expected, because it’s standard practice that you always have somebody to vouch that you were in the pub while you’re out bagging an unauthorised bit of game. Further to that, the consensus is that nobody goes shooting during the fortnight that these plays are on, because there’s just too much activity.’
‘I hope I’m hearing a “but” here,’ Catherine observed by way of urging him to get to it. You didn’t pipe up first just to tell everybody you had nothing.
‘Indeed. I spoke to a younger guy called Andy Philips. He’s seventeen. It was his dad I was there to talk to, Donny, but it turned out his boy had been out doing a bit of late-night fishing. It’s not just the woods that are well stocked on the Cragruthes estate, you see. He was on his way out here along the Oban road when he saw somebody getting into a black Range Rover some time after ten. He didn’t take note of the time; he was just estimating according to when he left the house and how long it normally took him to get there.’
‘Please tell me he got a plate.’
‘Sorry. The boy wasn’t wanting to be seen, so he was more concerned with staying out of sight at that point. But the driver emerged from the woods on the side of the road nearer the castle.’
‘Did he get any kind of look at him?’
‘Not much. Says he was dressed in dark-coloured camo with a hat pulled down ever his eyes. Weird thing is, he said he didn’t see a rifle. The bloke was running, though. Got into the Range Rover and took off in a hurry. Andy ditched his tackle at that point and was thinking of turning back because he thought the bloke might be running from gamekeepers. He’d heard a shot a wee while before; he thought maybe fifteen minutes but, as I said, he didn’t check his watch. He lay low for a while and when no keepers appeared he proceeded as planned. He didn’t know about what happened until I showed up, as he was fishing half the night and then sleeping.’
‘So do you know where the vehicle was parked?’
‘Aye. I drove Andy up to show me. It’s estate land on either side of the road at that point. The Range Rover was parked in a layby, about a kilometre from the castle as the crow flies, maybe a kilometre and a half on foot.’
‘Are you familiar with the territory?’
DC Frazer gave a coy smile.
‘I may have strayed on to it when I was Andy’s age, with a fishing rod purely for protection from the salmon.’
‘Perfect. I want you to take charge of a second ground search. Start from where the Range Rover was parked and work back towards the locus along the probable routes.’
‘Yes ma’am.’
It was a positive start, and just as well, because Catherine suspected the next part would be less dynamic.
‘Have we got anything new on the victim?’ she asked, for which, read ‘motive’.
All eyes fell on DI Malcolm Gillan, who did very well not to wince at being put on the spot. Nonetheless, his body language was clearly apologetic for what was about to follow. On a major investigation such as this, there was always going to be at least one job that would turn out to be like nailing jelly to a wall, and he had been assigned it. There was no way of knowing that in advance, so she hoped he understood amid his frustrations that giving him this beat was an endorsement, not a booby prize. She knew it was going to be crucial, so she needed someone who could get the job done.
‘A whole load of bugger-all at the moment,’ he admitted. ‘No business deals gone sour, no drug habit connecting him to the wrong people, no debts, obviously, and no Jekyll-and-Hyde public face versus business face stuff. So far I’m getting the impression Barney the Dinosaur had more enemies.’
‘I’d shoot Barney the Dinosaur,’ Catherine said, partly to offer Malcolm a boost and partly in bitter memory of the cloying dreck she’d had to sit through when the boys were very small.
‘Detectives have spoken to the family,’ Malcolm went on, ‘and we’re also using their information to spread our inquiries to close friends and to his professional associates. Nobody’s jumping up to point any fingers, so no obvious candidate has leapt to anyone’s mind. The one thing that sticks out so far is that Queen was in the middle of his third divorce. It’s possible his latest flame had a rival suitor – or even a husband – who was the jealous type, but at this stage we don’t know if there even was a latest flame.
‘Three wives and counting also implies that he was given to flinging it about; certainly if there’s a vice to be looked into, it would appear to be women. However, the main thing is we’re aware that the dirt and the grudges don’t start coming out until the eulogies are all finished, so we might have to be patient.’
‘It’s early days,’ Catherine agreed, trying to sound supportive, but everybody knew this was bad news. It was early days, but in another sense it was already very late. They were way past the twenty-four-hour mark and moving into the exponential stage, whereby the longer it took, the longer it was going to take.
Nobody was pointing fingers, no names were leaping to anyone’s mind. Nobody had a motive. Nobody had a clue.
‘What about our secondary angle?’ she asked the room. ‘The possibility that the shot was wide and Sir Angus McCready was the target?’
It was Laura’s turn to look apologetic.
‘Nothing coming in to support that so far, boss. A dispute with a property developer where he’d agreed to sell off some land then changed his mind, that’s the only controversy in his recent past, and it wasn’t that recent: 2006. A lot of lawyer sabre-rattling on either side, then it died away. He’s mouthed off about the animal rights lobby a few times in the local papers,
so that might be worth pursuing, but he’s not exactly Huntingdon Life Sciences. He seems popular enough with the punters around here, mostly getting “decent cove” and “harmless old duffer” type reviews. We’re digging into his private life as discreetly as we can manage.’
‘Keep it that way,’ Catherine said. ‘We don’t want the political fall-out from our aristocratic innocent bystander discovering he’s being investigated. And in the event that he was the intended target, then nor do we want the shooter to know we’re on to that possibility.’
‘Yes boss.’
‘Now, anything else we need to share?’
Catherine scanned the faces around the rapidly heating room and noticed that one of them wasn’t giving her his undivided attention, being instead bathed in the glow of an open laptop.
‘Beano, I’ve told you before: you can bring in games on the last day of term, but no earlier.’
‘I’m sorry boss,’ he responded. He raised his head dutifully, but his attention was still partly on his screen. ‘It’s the RBS guest list. It just pinged into the inbox the second you called us to order, and I wanted to bring us up to speed if there was anything we should know.’
‘And is there?’
‘Yes. The bad news for us is that I’ve double-checked my count and it currently shows thirty-three names.’
‘Shit,’ said Catherine, then she picked up on Beano’s key word. ‘Hang on, what do you mean “currently”?’
This prompted a grin from the Detective Constable.
‘Because the bad news for the guy who sent it is that, working for the RSB, I’m guessing they teach you a lot more about using Excel and PowerPoint than about using Word. This document was edited about two minutes before it was sent.’
‘That’s as may be,’ Catherine countered, ‘but if he just opened it to check it was the right file, it would say it was last edited at that point, wouldn’t it?’
‘Only if changes were made. I’m guessing he’s never clicked on the Review tab, or he’d know that the Track Changes option had been enabled.’
‘And does that show that something’s been deleted?’
‘Better than that. Not only can I tell you for sure that there was a thirty-fourth person on that list, I can tell you his name and, just as importantly, who deleted it.’
Rite of Passage
The village of Balnavon was clouded in a light and misty drizzle as Fallan drove Jasmine through it in his Land Rover. The dreich weather was having the opposite effect of the sunshine upon Culfieth Hydro, rendering what ought to have appeared a couthy and charming little rural settlement gloomy and oppressive. Tearooms and tourist shops that might otherwise have appeared cosy and colourful looked washed-out and claustrophobic, venues for interminably miserable afternoons on ill-judged day trips.
She could understand why Callum Ross got out; the only question was how he’d stuck it here so long. The surrounding countryside was no doubt spectacular, when you could see it through the clouds of rain and clouds of midges but, having grown up in the comforting anonymity of cities, Jasmine couldn’t imagine walking down the same wee streets every day, seeing the same faces, knowing every one of them and every one of them knowing your business.
They had passed the Kildrachan estate on the way into town, its broad entrance sweeping away from the road between two redoubtable stone gateposts. There was no visible sign of the house itself, the track quickly vanishing into dense and mature woodland. Jasmine couldn’t stop herself wondering whether Tessa Garrion’s remains lay somewhere behind those gates and beneath the dark of those trees, waiting for discovery and the justice it might bring. Little that she had uncovered about this case had given her reason to believe Tessa had survived the summer of 1981; and only the flaky testimony of a hippy-chick barmaid suggested she had ever made it out of Balnavon. Whether she had got on that bus or not, what was indisputable was that she’d never been seen again.
Jasmine knew from a conversation with Charlotte that Hamish’s elderly parents still lived at Kildrachan with a small housekeeping staff. She felt dreadful for them. She didn’t imagine losing a child was any easier when he was fifty-five than if he was a tenth of that and, coming towards the last years of your own life, surely you’d want the comfort of knowing that those you had brought into the world were going to keep thriving.
The thought of Charlotte had given her more pause. Charlotte had grown up at Hamish’s own handsome Highland pile, about thirty miles away in Ardcruich. She was most likely with her mother down south, but Jasmine couldn’t help but worry in case she was visiting her grandparents for mutual comfort and support.
Their last words had been in anger, mainly Charlotte’s. It had been ten minutes of stream-of-consciousness invective, circular and repetitive, fired by that unique indignation felt by the over-privileged on the rare occasions when the world didn’t bow to their expectations.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she kept saying. There wasn’t any particular detail she was incredulous of, so much as the revelation that a nobody such as Jasmine could do anything other than kiss her Pilates-sculpted arse. Gotta watch this breed, Charlotte, they’ll turn on ya.
‘I can’t believe you would betray me like this,’ was her opening salvo. As in, before even identifying herself to the person who had answered the phone. ‘You’re working for that bitch, aren’t you? I put myself out for you and you’re just a muck-raker, sifting through the dirt for that gold-digger. I can’t believe it. I thought you were a friend. I thought you were somebody I could trust. You made your job sound all clever and exciting but it’s just sleaze and innuendo. I can’t believe it.’
It didn’t sound like Hamish had told Charlotte much, or indeed anything, about what they had actually discussed. As far as Jasmine knew, he may not have lied outright to his daughter either: it seemed to be Charlotte who was drawing her own conclusions, revealing a few of the chinks in her armour as a result. Hamish Queen was divorced from Charlotte’s mother, who had been his second wife, and it turned out he had been in the throes of divorce number three. Charlotte, needless to say, wasn’t galpals with her mother’s successor, and was clearly still bearing a lot of scars from the break-up.
If Jasmine ran into her up here, it wouldn’t so much be awkward as utterly sordid.
Jasmine had placed a call to Mrs Petrie to give her an update. It was just a means of checking in and making sure she was still content for Jasmine to pursue her inquiries; she had no intention of telling her what those inquiries were unavoidably pointing to.
She didn’t get to speak to her. Mrs Petrie’s daughter answered the call and informed her that her mother was in hospital ‘again’. Alison, as she gave her name, had come down to Cornwall to help out.
‘She has peaks and troughs,’ Alison said. ‘We’re hoping she’ll be back on her feet in a few days, but you always worry how much each bad spell is going to take out of her.’
‘I understand,’ Jasmine had told her.
She gave Alison a vague and neutral message to pass on regarding her progress. Making inquiries, developing a picture of Tessa’s life as an actress, following up solid leads. She worded it carefully: ‘solid’ rather than ‘good’. Solid made it sound like reliable information; good made it sound like it would lead to a positive resolution.
On one level it was a relief not to talk to Mrs Petrie direct, not to have to hear the guarded hope in her voice as she asked questions, and not to feel like a sleaze for stringing her along and keeping back the truth. On another level, her call to Alison brought home how painful this was all ultimately going to be, when she would have to tell Alice, like all those other clients before her, that she had acted too late in trying to find her sister. Thirty years too late, in fact.
She recalled her mum’s deterioration, the way she’d look like she was slipping into the final throes, but somehow kept finding it in herself to rally. What would it do to Mrs Petrie when the one thing she had pinned her hopes upon was taken away?
The church hall, or rather the ‘community centre’ was right on the main drag, the church itself set back from the road up a short but steep banking. Even allowing for the greyness of the day it was the epitome of nondescript: Calvinist austerity extending even to the architecture. If buildings could have emotions, this one looked like it was in the huff, tucked away from the passing traffic and sulkily determined not to catch anyone’s eye.
Across the street and just a few yards further north was the Balnavon Hotel, a more welcoming sight partly due to its brighter aesthetics, but as much down to the chalkwritten promise of a pub lunch after the best part of three hours on the road.
Fallan went up to the bar to order while Jasmine sat at a wooden table and took in the surroundings. The walls were bare stone, hand-hewn rocks rather than kiln-fired brick, the floor a matt sheen of dark grey slate. It might have seemed a little cold but for the fire in the grate, which instead added to an atmosphere that was both warm and somehow timeless. It was easy to imagine the place having changed little in maybe a hundred years.
She would have been completely wrong, though. Framed photographs betrayed how the interior had looked not so long ago: plaster and paint on the walls, swirly carpets on the floor, beaten-copper tabletops and garish tartan upholstery. She saw images of smiling groups posing for the camera to record big nights: grinning, tipsy men holding up a huge fish; a man with a golf ball in one hand and in the other a cardboard number one with a hole through it; footballers displaying signed jerseys or just posing with the regulars.
Fallan returned with the drinks and some encouraging information.
‘Checked the licensee certificate on the wall,’ he told her. ‘It says Mr M. Aitken.’
When the Devil Drives Page 24