The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  Nobody had seen him.

  He radioed in, locating the station where McCaffrey was based. And then gave them a quick call. He turned away instinctively as two other cops came close, aware of the silence in the still air and the ease with which he could be overheard.

  ‘You still up at the lochside?’ asked the desk sergeant.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, Isla McCaffrey has been on trying to locate her husband. He didn’t appear for the start of his shift this morning and he didn’t come home last night or the night before. That will be Isla McCaffrey as in …’

  ‘The wife of the bloke who drives the Clubman? It’s still here. I think it has been here for some time.’ Mulholland read out the plate number.

  ‘That’s a match.’

  ‘Yeah, can’t be many with three kiddie seats inside.’ Mulholland looked round to the deep water of the loch. He’d put an alert out for McCaffrey, talked to his senior officer, but had the sinking feeling he’d be calling out the underwater search team before darkness fell.

  When Hannah got back to her cottage flat in Govan she thought about doing the hoovering, but she was too tired, almost too tired to sleep. She was always like this after doing a string of night shifts at A & E, she became a little excitable and found it difficult to sit down and relax. The flat was cold so she sat on the edge of the settee having a couple of quick cigarettes. It was still raining outside. She watched a neighbour walk her two wee girls past the flat, the neighbour looked in, saw her and waved. Hannah waved back and then settled back into the sofa, thinking about putting a log on the fire. Then have a shower, put on her jammys, light the fire and settle down with a cuppa and toast, thickly buttered with a teaspoon of Marmite on each slice. That would normally send her to sleep, and if that didn’t do it, sticking some daytime TV with its simpering banality definitely would.

  She went over to the fire; it was her proudest possession, this old flat with its original fireplace and a wood-burning stove reinstated. Kneeling down she dusted the ash away and brushed it into the ash box. She pulled out some old newspaper that her neighbours upstairs kept for her, and she started the dirty process of rolling them up five sheets at a time and tying a knot in them. There was something very pleasurable in getting her fingers so dirty, before having a shower and making sure she got them clean again.

  She placed a small firelighter in the grate and tossed in a few knots of newspaper and added a few more logs. Leaning back on the carpet, she thought about having a cup of tea before the shower. She squared off the pile of newspapers and put her hand down on the carpet to lever herself up onto her aching feet, then looked down at the front of the newspaper that was facing up at her, and the two faces on it, a one-word headline: MISTAKES. She looked again, picking up the paper and holding it close, reading it with tired eyes, scanning the picture, then looking at the date. The fourth of October.

  She looked closer at the face, and the name. She was sure it was her. Domestic abuse took place at home, not at work, and there was the name of a colleague, a safe person. She rubbed her hands down the front of her trousers, leaving jet streams of black ash on her thighs. So this woman might be this police officer. Might be. For all Hannah knew, her husband, the abuser, might also be a police officer. But she was involved with people like pathologists. Hannah read the caption under the photograph of the grey-haired man to confirm. These people knew all about the issues of patient confidentiality and the difficulties of identification. She was dealing with people who knew the score. It was worth a shot, she reached for her iPad.

  And here she was, walking around Uncle Archie and Aunt Pippa’s house. He had gone to work, after making it quite clear that he was not going to hold her hand, snoop or check up on her. She had asked him, as she always did, if the investigation into Abigail’s death was making any headway. The answer was always no, but he did say they were now looking at wider CCTV, the timeline and the logistics again. And that had panicked her. Alone in the kitchen, she tried to think.

  She sat for a long time, staring at the tabletop, letting the coffee go cold.

  She heard the phone ringing through in the hall. It would be for Archie, she let it go.

  It stopped then started again. Probably a sales call, so she walked over and put her hand out. It fell quiet as soon as she lifted it from its cradle. It wasn’t her house, it wasn’t her phone.

  The problem was, she didn’t know if she could actually do it. Not again. The water she poured from the kettle kept missing the cup, spreading over the worktop. She mopped it up; wishing the tremor in her hands would stop betraying her. The need for alcohol was intense; vodka, strong black coffee and a pro plus. She was supposed to be on decaff, vitamin C, Acamprosate and Fluoxetine, never on an empty stomach. Her larynx and the muscles of her throat had been damaged when she was attacked, so she had learned to eat and drink in a certain order. She had taken the pills out the dosset box and flushed them down the toilet. She was going to have an Americano and a couple of rich tea biscuits, a habit she had learned from Abigail when she had suffered from terrible morning sickness. The pain of that thought, the easy way the memory had popped up in her mind so unexpectedly, it punched her in the stomach with more pain than any attack she had suffered in the Blue Neptune. When Abigail had got pregnant with Malcolm, it was as if her sister was rubbing her face in her own infertility. The way Abigail looked at her sometimes, as if she had it all, and Valerie deserved to have, and to be, ‘lesser’. She closed the lid of the kettle, thinking how funny it was, the way life turned out. It was a true saying, it’s not where you start, it’s where you finish.

  A fleeting memory flashed through her mind, stubble on her cheek and the impression of a scent that she couldn’t identify. Maybe a perfume of Abigail’s. She gripped the side of the worktop in Archie’s pristine kitchen and tried to remember. There had been a man, a kiss, a cheek against hers.

  Sitting amongst the Robert Annan prints on the wall, at the melamine table with its cream and light-brown striped bench seat, she sipped her caffeinated coffee, and looked out the window to a bare tree, an empty bird feeder swinging back and forth in the wind. Her Agatha Christie biography, still stuck at page fifty-six. She let the tears run. She was fed up trying to be strong. Life beyond vodka had only been a few hours old, and she had no idea what was causing the pain that gnawed and chewed at her soul. The loss of her family? The loss of herself? Mourning that her affair with the bottle might be over? She was better than that, better off than that, she had a brain and she had Archie behind her. He would treat her like a daughter.

  Her future.

  The lack of future?

  If she ever was arrested, locked up, she really didn’t care. She’d have a roof over her head at least. That wasn’t the issue, at least it was something. The future that is unknown was far too awful to contemplate. She sipped at her coffee, letting the tears roll until they made little star-shaped drops on the tabletop. It was a future that was purposeless. It was a yawning great void that stretched in front of her and she could see nothing in it, nothing that was of any value to her.

  Maybe she could get another cat. Yeah, she could just see Archie’s face when she presented him with a litter tray. She looked out the window, there was a robin hopping around in the garden. That wasn’t something she saw when she had Alfred.

  She brushed away a tear …

  Who killed Cock Robin? It was the sparrow, with his bow and arrow.

  It shouldn’t be too bloody difficult to figure out who killed her sister.

  Surely.

  That was one question that wasn’t going to go away. And, the thought struck her as another teardrop fell, that might be the one question that she was uniquely placed to answer. Yet she could not.

  Where had she been at four o’clock that morning?

  The phone rang, she jumped. Maybe she would be better answering it and give Archie a message or swear at the person if it was a bloody sales call. Or she could let them speak and then say, ‘
Now let me tell you all about the Baby Jesus’. That usually made them hang up. She walked, rather quickly and with no loss of balance she noticed, into the living room and lifted the handset. The voice on the other end said, ‘Valerie? Can you give a message to Archie? His mobile is turned off.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, looking round for a pen, but knowing she used to have a very good memory. ‘Yes, of course I can take a message.’

  She was so touched that somebody used her name, and trusted her with a job that she started to cry.

  The helicopter journey had been quick and uneventful, the blades cutting their way through the dark clouds to land on the pad at Raigmore, where an emergency medical team had been waiting with full clinical support, right from the minute the young man’s stretcher had been clunked off its cradle on the chopper. Ten minutes later the patient was in a cubicle, on oxygen and plasma, platelets and four monitors, stabilizing him to give them time to work out what the bloody problem was. Apart from the big wide cut across his throat.

  And, in amongst them all, moving between them quietly, was Morna Taverner, a female constable, dressed in civvies covered in a sterile gown, carrying a pile of brown paper bags which she held open as the young man’s clothes were stripped and cut from him, and then delicately dropped into a bag, to be sealed, signed and removed from the premises.

  Morna Taverner had been following their conversation from the moment the trolley hit the tarmac. He looked to her like every other hiker or walker that liked to take on the challenge of the hills during the winter. An extreme hillwalker. He was an outdoorsy type anyway, as his boots were dropped into the evidence bag, she saw the dried pine needles fall from the indentations in the soles. The weather on the Bealach was too severe for trees, so he had been walking elsewhere and transferred to the peak. Except if he was an experienced hillwalker, he would have been dressed more appropriately. And he would not have been out there on his own. Not in November. Not without having left notice with somebody to raise the alarm if he failed to return when expected. He wouldn’t be the first to take off his jacket at the first sign of hypothermia. But there had been signs that he had been dragged to where he had been found. And the telltale cut on his throat.

  He had no signs indicative of being hit by a car, no first impact abrasions on the shins, nor the impact of the bonnet and the roll off the vehicle to the road. A senior casualty officer popped his head in and looked at the chart, his vitals, and finally looked at his face.

  ‘So throat cut and then what? He’s been beaten? A crowbar? Then thrown off an elevated site?’ The doctor looked a little confused.

  ‘Agreed, he was found like this at the top of the pass, then maybe dragged to the gully. The cut throat suggests foul play. Obviously.’

  ‘Are you the policewoman?’

  ‘Police officers we are supposed to be called now,’ Morna smiled. ‘How is he doing?’

  ‘Fair enough. We are going to wheel him down for an X-ray as soon as we get some bloods in him, get his temperature up. See if he’s got any blood on the brain, we will take it from there. If he’s ready, the scan will be within the next two hours but neurologically, there doesn’t seem to be any panic. But right now, he’s going to the high dependency unit.’

  And the wheels on the trolley were clicked down, the stretcher stabilized and he was away, his dirty feet sticking out the end of the trolley, a passing nurse picking up the blanket and smoothing it down, smiling at his immobile black and swollen face. ‘Any ideas who he is yet?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘Nope. Nobody has reported him missing as yet and he has no ID on him.’

  ‘There are some bloody mad bampots out there.’ She looked out the window, as if she meant Inverness itself.

  Anderson was studying a printout of unsolved rapes over the last ten years, searching through it, looking for connections. The pad beside him was full of scribbles and doodles, mostly excluding those incidents from the connections he was trying to make.

  He answered his phone automatically, surprised at the very quiet voice on the other end, very young, almost a girl. She pronounced his name Coleen Anderrrson, soft consonants, a Highlander, he thought. ‘Yes, indeed, how can I help you?’ He assumed the attitude he did when he talked to one of his daughter’s friends. This sounded like a student wanting help with a dissertation. Probably passed on by Mitchum who obviously thought he didn’t have enough to do and that he was only sitting at his desk, looking at a sequence of rapes for his own amusement.

  ‘DCI Anderson, this is DC Morna Taverner. I’m up at Wester Ross, CID’, she added, as if she had forgotten and had realized that he might like to know. ‘I have been doing a cold case computer trawl …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and leaned back in his chair, knowing exactly where the conversation was going.

  ‘And I came across your name more than once, about the A835 rape?’

  ‘Not familiar with that.’

  ‘No reason why you should be. It’s the Sally Logan and Gillian Witherspoon cases you have been looking at. Our footprints over the archive keep crossing, so I thought you might be interested in Nicola Barnes, she was a twenty-three-year-old, out on her own, taken off the road – the A835 as it comes into Ullapool. It was the eleventh of July 2004.’

  He heard her take a deep breath.

  ‘And there was an incident in 1987? A seventeen-year-old girl disappeared at—’

  ‘That’s a long time ago,’ Anderson said quietly. ‘Do you have anything else?’ Anything? He was encouraging, betting that this was usually as far as she got in her pitch. There would be nothing in this. She was young, trying to make connections, seeing them where none existed. She would be on the end of the phone sitting in a large office somewhere talking quietly, cupping her phone with the palm of her hand. He imagined her with a nervous tic, pulling her hair behind her ear the way Claire had done since the day she was born if she had ever been in trouble, or Peter’s habit of biting his upper lip.

  ‘You have been working on the Logan and Witherspoon rapes. I think there are similarities.’ She was more definite now, fortified by his interest.

  ‘Are you working cold case?’

  ‘No.’

  There was quiet, he could hear her breathing.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  So this was a current case she was working and had searched the database for similarities. She sounded inexperienced. He closed his eyes and let her continue. ‘There was an injury to her left shoulder. The computer coughed that up. And of course the rapes. The lack of DNA, the forensic awareness and—’

  ‘The fact he hasn’t been caught,’ Anderson added. ‘What does your boss say? I mean, you shouldn’t be looking at this if you are not on a cold case unit?’

  ‘OK, but this is something I am interested in.’ A pause.

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘My DCI doesn’t agree with me but he said I could call you.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ said Anderson, at least she had ran it past him. ‘You see, he will need something to go on, a weight of evidence before he can justify spending time and money on taking the investigation further. There will have been a full investigation at the time. So if no new evidence has come to light it can be difficult to justify … Well, it’s difficult to justify. That’s all.’

  Silence. He could almost hear the disappointment as if somebody had physically deflated her at the other end of the phone. No doubt this was exactly what her boss had told her.

  He heard a long sigh.

  ‘And has any other evidence come to light?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the computer system has made no other links, no other connections?’

  ‘No. Just your name. And the method. The arm. Women …’ All her enthusiasm had gone.

  ‘Are you working on something else right now?’

  ‘I’m in the hospital, minding a young man we found on the Bealach Na Ba.’

  He had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Do you have him handcuffed
to the bed?’

  She laughed lightly. ‘Not that kind of minding. He was dumped up there with a bad head injury, his face has been beaten to a pulp, throat cut. We don’t know if he’ll pull through, we haven’t confirmed an ID yet. It’s so sad, but I’m sitting with him, I will be here when he wakes up. If he wakes up. There’s a wee flicker every now and again, you know, so I am not risking walking away but I am bored so I was flicking through my notebook. I have been meaning to call you for a while.’

  ‘The best thing you can do is be there. It sounds as though you have your hands full, so why don’t you email me the file. And tell your boss that you have done that, make sure it’s noted. He can’t refuse permission retrospectively,’ said Anderson. But he could kick off.

  ‘Oh yes, yes I will.’

  ‘I’ve just been given a few more days to review these cold cases so I will look at yours as well. If I find any other convergence of the cases, I will get back to you.’

  As in: don’t call us, we will call you.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘thank you so much.’

  She sounded so grateful, he felt like a right bastard.

  ‘What was your name again?’

  ‘Morna Taverner.’

  ‘And your DCI?’

  ‘Patrick, Alastair Patrick. He’s from Glasgow, that was years ago, he’s quite old now.’

  Aren’t we all? ‘OK. Let me have a look, bye for now.’

  ‘Thank you DCI … Colin, Mr Anderson, ta.’ And the phone clicked off.

  After the phone call, Valerie looked at the calendar, counting back and then marking the days when Costello had last been seen. Uncle Archie was concerned about her, her work colleagues didn’t seem to be making much of it, so where was she? She didn’t know Costello; she had seen her and heard her but had never actually met her, but she had exchanged a few words with a woman called Dali Despande – a name once heard not forgotten – who was also concerned about Costello, but was more concerned about George Haggerty. If Costello had gone off after him, well, more power to her …