The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  With a bit of luck, he’d be working.

  He was turning that around in his mind when he heard another vehicle, bigger than the small Fiat he was expecting. The air-cooled whirr of an old VW? The oblong shape of a camper was highlighted for a moment as it swung into the car park. Its headlights illuminated the trees and the shrubs that surrounded the café, the arc of brightness shone on the empty shelves and the seats upturned on the tables before being switched off. The vehicle drove behind the line of trees, moving from his sight. McCaffrey looked in the rear-view mirror with professional interest. Was this what he had been summoned to witness? He slid down in the driver’s seat, watching as a figure emerged from the bushes, thin and swift, moved quickly, driven by the weather but not furtive. He walked like a young man, an impression added to by long slender legs and bulky jacket. He was holding something in front of him as he walked in plain sight round the windows of the café, into the darkness, then reappeared as an outline on the secluded path up to An Ceann Mor. Then he disappeared.

  McCaffrey stayed in the Mini, watching out the rear-view mirror, then twisting in the seat to look through the rear-passenger and then the front-passenger window, but the figure had gone, swallowed by the trees and the darkness of the sky. It was bitter cold and as dark as the devil’s armpit, as his mum used to say.

  At least the rain was easing. The windows of the car steamed up again. He wished he hadn’t had that last cup of coffee. He’d need to brace himself, get out and have a pee in the bushes. And he’d be better doing that before she appeared. He’d need to be quick before his willy froze.

  He switched the CD off, wondering about the owner of the campervan. The driver had looked young so McCaffrey’s mind turned to drugs and God knew they had enough problems with substance abuse around here and in Balloch and Alexandria. And there had been a spate of killings of the wallabies that inhabited some of the islands on the loch. A couple of weeks ago, the carcass of one poor beast had been spotted by a tour boat. It had been skinned and pegged out on a small patch of sandy beach, a bloodied pink mass for the entire world to see.

  That had made the front page of the papers and the drug issue was right in the public eye, now that it was affecting the middle classes and the tourists. And that guy from the campervan had been carrying something. If he was one of the gang killing the wildlife then there would be a small boat ready for him somewhere. The waters of the loch were very dark now.

  McCaffrey made a decision, his nagging bladder forgotten. No wallabies were going to be harmed on his watch. He got out the car, pulling up the zip of his jacket before winding the scarf round his neck. He dug his hands deep into his gloves and walked round the back of the Mini, ignoring the bite of the cold wind that scurried in across the water and the reminders from his bladder. It had stopped raining but the chill ate at his muscles. He felt as if he was wearing no clothes at all. He shivered, jogging across the path on to the soft grass and stared into the car park, seeing the distinctive outline of the two-tone Volkswagen camper. When he was a boy, these were the transport of vegetarian peace-loving hippies not animal-torturing psychopaths. He turned, cutting across the other car park to follow the path of the younger man, walking up to An Ceann Mor, the big wooden structure with its bench seats and central walkway was easily visible against the skyline.

  Maybe if the wind had been quieter, he might have heard the small van pull into the car park, its headlights out, and the engine off so the vehicle rolled with the lie of the land. If McCaffrey had looked back to check his car, he might have seen the man get out the vehicle, dressed in black, black gloves, black hat pulled low. He might have seen the long slim blade as he too followed the path to up to An Ceann Mor.

  Valerie had no idea where she was.

  Something rough against her lips, her shoulder numb and her feet very cold, sticking out of her warm cocoon. It seemed she was bound in a cloud of cotton wool; soft and warm, but it bound her all the same. She tried, but couldn’t move any of her limbs, or straighten up, or stretch out. She had no hope of getting up on her feet. Her head hurt. Her legs were burning, her thighs sticky with her own urine. And the room was reeking with the dull smell of faecal matter.

  That was obvious at least. She had shat herself.

  Opening her eyes, she looked across a green field that stretched forever, until it reached a piece of wooden fence, a flat solid white fence. As she allowed her eyes to focus, in the dark that wasn’t really dark, she began to make sense of it all.

  She had fallen on the floor, rolled off the bed taking her duvet with her. From the feel of it she had hit her head on the way down, probably off the small white bedside table and as she had lain there drunk, as her bladder and bowel had voided.

  That wasn’t a first.

  And then the full horror of it. This was a hotel room, not her home.

  Slowly she tried to unwind herself from the duvet, trying not to throw up and add to the mess of the bodily fluids. Another thought stuck her through the maze that passed for her intellect nowadays. If this was in a hotel room then housekeeping would be coming in sooner or later. They couldn’t find her like this, in this awful state. Alcoholism is the most private of diseases. It hides in plain sight.

  In the end, after about ten minutes of writhing and slow acrobatics, she freed herself and crawled across the carpet on all fours, leaving the duvet, soiled and wet, in a pile near the bottom of the bed.

  She got to the door and, holding onto the handle, she pulled herself up on her knees and listened. There was a flash of a memory. Could she recall, vaguely, being here the night before, between the first and second bottle? Doing something like this at some time? She flicked over the plastic sign hanging from the doorknob. On the inside.

  Do not disturb.

  Not even sober enough to put the sign out.

  Still not sober enough to have an accurate memory of it.

  From last night or this morning? Or this evening? She opened the door as quickly as possible, peering down the corridor, to the right and to the left before she slid the sign out, the scab on the palm of her hand nipping as she slid it up against the wood to the handle.

  She retreated inside the room and tucked herself in the corner of the carpet and the door. She closed her eyes and slid down a little more, her body folding onto the floor.

  Her eyes were crusty and jaggy. She picked at her eyelashes with inaccurate fingers, missing the islands of scabs, poking herself in the eye a few times, making her blink. She could sense the solidity of the darkness outside the room now. It was very quiet, much later at night. Maybe midnight. Maybe not. Time was very elastic these days.

  Closing her eyes again, she tried to stand, levering herself up between the door and the wall, and then she saw the bed, minus the duvet, with the expanse of rumpled white sheet with dark islands of staining, and in the middle, framed by wrinkles in the Egyptian cotton, lay a small black gun.

  A gun.

  And then, as she held onto the wall, she remembered.

  She couldn’t even kill herself properly.

  She was a high-functioning alcoholic and had been for years. Her drinking never bothered her, it was life she couldn’t really contend with. She had never suffered bad hangovers because she had barely ever sobered up. The constant top-ups gave her strength and kept that black dog from snapping at her too much, kept it from biting at her heels. She drank to be happy. Her drinking had brought her to this misery.

  Why did she get a gun that didn’t work? What was wrong with her that nothing, nothing ever went right?

  She was too tired, and too sore to cry. What was the point? She picked up the gun and slid back down to the floor, her head thumping as she went. Crawling over the carpet, pushing the gun in front of her, she thought how bloody stupid it would be if the gun went off now and blew her leg off, or her arm off or half her face. Or if it went right through her brain, in the front and out the back, leaving her a dribbling incoherent vegetable, a bag on a drip in her arm putting nu
trients in as the catheter took the metabolites out to fill another bag. She tapped it along a little more gently, slipped it into her suitcase using the zipped pocket at the side. Then she thought again, and stuck it into her handbag.

  Her mobile phone was lying on the floor where she had flung it, so she slithered across the floor towards it. The black screen refused to swipe into life. She hadn’t charged it up. Nobody had called her for weeks now, nobody except the police, and lawyers, and they weren’t calling Valerie Abernethy the woman. They were calling Valerie Abernethy the victim. Or the suspect. No friends ever called her. No friends had called when Abigail had died. No friends had visited her in the hospital.

  Alcoholics do not have friends. They use people so much that friendships wear away, slip away, here with the roses, and gone in the autumn.

  It was winter now, the deep, deep winter.

  TWO

  Sunday, 26th of November

  Old Salty’s Fish and Chip Emporium was busy, and very noisy. Adding to the usual chattering and cutlery commotion was the family at table eight, who were having some birthday Jenga-with-chips competition. The very attractive Australian waitress was judging and the rest of the restaurant were clapping and taking bets.

  All except the four men sitting at table nine.

  Four men on a table set for five.

  They were subdued, three of them picking at their chips with their fingers, the eldest of the four using a fork. Failure has a bitter taste that no amount of cheesecake can sweeten; they ate as if their food was choking them, totally oblivious to the birthday celebrations in the next booth.

  The four men; three detectives and a procurator fiscal. It was the first time they had met since the brutal murder of Abigail Haggerty and her son Malcolm six weeks before.

  Not something anybody with a human soul should get over quickly.

  They had an unspoken pact not to talk about it. That had lasted until the first lull in conversation, between the fish and chips being cleared away and the arrival of the cheesecake. They had exhausted the ‘how are the kids doing?’ conversation for Gordon Wyngate, and the ‘how is Baby Moses doing?’ conversation for Anderson.

  Archie Walker related the story of walking round the house with Valerie and the missing picture and Lego model. At that point they all tried to avoid talking about Costello when she was the one thing they really did want to talk about; she was their thread of commonality.

  It was a puzzle that consumed the detectives, eating away at their core. At the heart of the case was a strange coincidence, which was later revealed not to be so much of a coincidence at all. The Blue Neptune Case and the deaths at the Monkey House, as the tragedy of the Haggertys had become known, were ‘intertwined, but legally separate cases’ as the fiscal had put it. And the Haggerty case was under the eagle eye of DCI Diane Mathieson. Those sitting around the table, as part of the original team at the Blue Neptune, had been debriefed, welcomed, tolerated and then told in no uncertain terms to ‘bugger off and to stop trying to be helpful’, according to DI Bannon or ‘stop bloody interfering’, according to DCI Mathieson.

  While they had no reason to meet, none of them had wanted to be the one to call off a date that had been pencilled into the diary for weeks. And they wanted to know about the problem. Costello’s empty chair.

  DCI Colin Anderson, the blonde detective in the jeans and casual shirt, had had very little to do with the case professionally, but he had a declared personal interest. This personal interest, the discovery of a daughter he never knew he had, automatically precluded him from any further professional connection. And he was becoming aware that it wasn’t in his nature to accept that.

  Archie Walker, the fiscal, looked to be his immaculately dressed self, but the constant drumming of his fingers, the frequent glances at his watch, betrayed him. He might have been trying to fool himself that all was OK in his world but he was having no luck fooling the three detectives round the table with him. His goddaughter was suspected of murdering her sister and her son. And she had no alibi. No memory. Only now was he discovering the issue of her alcoholism, mostly from reading his online newspapers.

  Viktor Mulholland was watchful, keen to enhance his career here. This situation was a mess and he knew Diane Mathieson. He might hear something round this table that he could casually mention to her. Indeed, she was already approaching him, not any of the others, for any information she needed. That might be a simple matter of rank, but Mulholland suspected something more political. Mathieson was a player and Mulholland hadn’t quite come to a decision about which team to back. His present career trajectory was on shaky ground. With Costello gone, and the increased likelihood of Anderson going, the solid peg he had pinned his entire career on was now looking very shoogly indeed. And Mathieson had a reputation as a two-faced wee bitch. Being a cop who investigated cops was bad enough, but her track record was worse than most. She was after Costello for harassment of George Haggerty. And that complaint was justified.

  Mulholland didn’t like being associated with Anderson’s team, not now Complaints were sniffing around, but he didn’t enjoy the thought of being exposed in a new team led by a woman with only her own ambition at heart, so he was watching both Anderson and Walker carefully. Both men seemed deep in thoughts that he would like to have access to.

  However, Gordon Wyngate was happily eating his cheesecake, aware of the tensions round the table and easy in the knowledge that he would be the one who would unwittingly broach any forbidden subject. So he did. ‘When’s the trial starting?’

  The silence fell like a rock through a cloud.

  Wyngate wanted the ground to swallow him, Mulholland merely smiled.

  ‘No date set yet,’ said Walker calmly.

  ‘Do you think—’ Wyngate stopped as Mulholland accidently stabbed him in the thigh with his fork and interrupted with a question of his own.

  ‘Is Braithwaite still blaming everybody else?’

  ‘Yes, and he has Tomlinson defending. Well, I have heard.’ Walker intertwined his fingers and placed his chin on the mound of knuckles.

  ‘You have Valerie’s testimony. She survived. You were out with her yesterday, she must be getting more …?’ asked Anderson, the question had to be asked now.

  ‘Sober? Do you mean will she be fit enough to appear as a coherent witness? Is that what you are asking?’ Walker snapped. He was touchy on the subject of the darling goddaughter who had fallen from grace so spectacularly.

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant, not at all. I meant, can she stand up to that questioning.’

  A roar of excitement went up at the Jenga table.

  ‘She lost her niece, then her sister and her nephew.’ The fiscal raised three fingers. ‘The three people in the world she was closest to. How do you expect her to be?’

  ‘Archie, I know she’ll be in tatters …’

  ‘Are you asking if she’s stopped drinking?’

  ‘No,’ placated Anderson, ‘I’m genuinely asking after her welfare. She was half-strangled and left to die in a cupboard, so I’m asking how she’s doing.’

  ‘She’s doing OK,’ answered Walker. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘You’re her godfather, and that excludes you from having any place in the investigation.’

  ‘And as Mary Jane’s father, you can have no place in it either,’ snapped Walker.

  It wasn’t like them to stick the knife in. Wyngate began to find the morsel of cheesecake on his plate mesmerizing as Mulholland slid back in his chair, enjoying this gladiatorial exchange. He found Valerie Abernethy fascinating. A successful young woman who had everything; a career, a Porsche, a £600,000 flat and then threw it all away when she tried to buy a baby. The investigation into her life had revealed a story much more sordid than anyone would have thought. Mulholland thought it had broken Walker. His darling goddaughter was a delusional drunk, and then Mathieson had actioned the investigation into Valerie Abernethy as a viable suspect for the murder of her sister and her nephew. As f
ar as Mulholland knew, the only motive was sibling rivalry; Abigail hadn’t fucked up her life quite as much as Valerie had. A thin motive, but they had all known addicts kill for less. Alcohol messed with your thinking, that whole compass of acceptable behaviour was reset to where the next drink was coming from. Mulholland had not voiced the opinion, but it was obvious Valerie being the wielder of the knife solved a few unanswered questions. The lateness of the night yet Abigail opened the door. The neighbour said they had been alive at one a.m. Who else would Abigail take up to the bedroom? Who else would take Malcolm’s beloved Millennium Falcon? Who else but the woman who gave it to him? Strange trophy for a killer. There were six stab wounds to the woman, twelve to the boy. The weapon had come from the house, a new set of knives George had bought the month before at Abigail’s request. Or so George Haggerty had said. And there was no witness left alive who could say whether Valerie had been in the house that evening.

  That was all he knew, common knowledge round the station, there would be a whole other layer they were not privy to.

  ‘God, those two arseholes still think Valerie had something to do with killing her sister.’ Walker clapped his hands over his face.

  Mulholland looked down, avoiding their eyes.

  ‘Who? Mathieson and Bannon?’ clarified Anderson.

  ‘They are a couple of arseholes,’ agreed Mulholland, playing along, ‘well she is.’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘But Valerie was in the hospital recovering. Braithwaite had a real go at her,’ Mulholland asked, fishing for information, seeing Anderson rub his own neck, remembering.

  ‘Somebody had a real go at her. She has blackouts. Had blackouts,’ Walker corrected himself. ‘And she was not in the hospital the night of the murders. She’d walked out at the back of seven that night.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard that rumour,’ said Mulholland, a little too readily.

  ‘Why?’ asked Wyngate. ‘Had she not just been strangled?’

  ‘Yes, but she had recovered from that. There was no brain damage. No damage to her larynx. And she has other issues. It was very stressful for her to be in the hospital and as she needed peace more than she needed medical attention they came to a compromise. She was free to come and go.’ Walker pulled a face. ‘I wish to god she had stayed in, got herself a rock solid alibi.’