The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  She got out her notebook and looked over her list of the items she had photographed before she had replaced them in the brown paper bag before resealing, signing and dating the label.

  Now, she was looking at the injuries, the head, the neck, the forearms, the hands, all defence wounds, or those of the attack itself, except those on the palms of his hands. Morna had recognized them, the same pattern covered Finn’s knees every summer.

  Gravel? So was he running along and he fell? Running along the road at the Bealach Na Ba, running to get away?

  But you fall on your knees harder than you’d fall on your hands, surely?

  Had he been crouching? Knocked to the ground? Or was he hunched down like he was doing the one hundred metres, down on his hunkers looking for something when he was clubbed on the back of his head, then the knife across his throat?

  And why that smell of petrol or engine oil?

  What had he been doing?

  ‘I think that is his phone.’ Isla McCaffrey passed the plastic bag over to the big male detective, ignoring the small nippy blonde with the bright red lipstick. ‘But I can’t say for sure. It’s in pieces.’

  ‘This may be totally unconnected but do you recognize this jumper?’ Bannon showed her his iPad, showing an old beige Fair Isle jumper. The bloodstains down the front were obvious to anybody who had reason to recognize them.

  ‘No, he wouldn’t wear something like that.’ Isla seemed to relax a little.

  ‘Thank you, so it’s quite simple,’ said Mathieson through her little red mouth. ‘We are trying to understand why your husband’s car was up on the lochside on Saturday evening. And we are keen to ascertain his whereabouts now, as I am sure you are,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘You have phoned about four times asking me where Donnie is and why the car is up there, but I’ve told you that I don’t know. He’s a police officer.’ Isla shrugged, confused. ‘Surely you know?’

  ‘He was off duty. There was no professional reason for him to be there.’

  Isla shook her head, her dark curls, unbrushed and tangled, danced round the side of her ears. Dropping her head, she rubbed at her eyes with the palm of her hands. ‘I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Saturday night. He was going to work.’

  ‘But he wasn’t, Mrs McCaffrey, he wasn’t going to work. He was at Loch Lomond. Can you shed any light why he might have gone there? It would help us a lot.’

  ‘He was going out to work,’ Isla insisted. ‘He wasn’t doing anything wrong. Where is he?’ She folded herself up on the settee, her sobs racking her body.

  Mathieson looked at Bannon, catching the odd choice of words. Isla McCaffrey was harbouring some doubts of her own about what her husband had been up to.

  ‘I’m sorry, Isla, but we do need to know what happened when you last saw him. Do you know why he would be up at Inveruglass?’

  She sat up. The precise question concentrating her mind. ‘No, I don’t, but he was sitting there.’ She pointed to the chair that Bannon was sitting on now, a pile of children’s clothes, ironed, ready for the drawer were sitting on the arm of the chair beside him. ‘Right there and his phone went, his mobile.’ She glanced at the plastic evidence bag that lay between them like a traitor. ‘And he read the message and said he was going out. That was all that happened.’

  ‘And what time was that?’

  ‘About half past six? Quarter to seven?’

  ‘Leaving his three young children to go out? Was that usual, he got a phone call and just got up and left?’

  ‘It had happened a few times.’

  They both caught the slight falter in her tone, she knew now in retrospect that something had gone badly wrong. It had started with that phone call.

  ‘The phone call or the going out?’

  ‘Both. Have you checked the hospitals, he could have had an accident?’ She looked up and smiled, her face losing ten years of pain with the one slight hope, somewhere her husband might be.

  ‘We have an alert out, if he’s admitted to hospital, then we will know. Who was this phone call from?’

  ‘I can’t work out where he might be, it’s not like him not to keep in touch.’ Despite the heat, she shivered.

  Bannon noticed the evasion and spoke again, now his voice very gentle. ‘I’ve never met your husband, Isla, but nobody has a bad word to say about him. So anything you can tell us will help. I look round and I see a young man with three lovely wee children.’ Bannon nodded at the photographs of the kids on the sideboard. ‘Cases involving other people’s children can really get to you when you are a father yourself.’

  ‘Oh it did, it really did. He had been so upset by it, all that baby stuff going on at the Blue Neptune. He had felt restricted in what he was able to do to help. He thought he had read in the newspaper that they had caught the people responsible.’

  ‘That must have given him some comfort?’

  She closed her eyes. ‘A little, it gets confusing beyond that as Donnie felt he couldn’t say anything to me about the cases he was working on. But he wasn’t working on that case, so he had a lot to say. The woman who survived?’

  ‘Valerie Abernethy?’ guessed Mathieson looking momentarily confused.

  ‘So, she’s another live witness to give evidence, and that made two, so that was good. They weren’t going to get away with what they did to those women, to that young girl. He was pleased with that.’

  ‘Was he talking to anybody actually involved in that case?’ asked Mathieson pointedly, causing Bannon to roll his eyes at the harsh implication of the question.

  ‘He didn’t say much, but I can put two and two together. You see he talked a lot about joining the CID. Doing something that he wanted to do, to make a difference. It gave him a warm feeling in his stomach. He wanted to do what he called tough police work. Waiting and watching, ready to do something. He wanted to make a difference, that’s all he wanted to do.’ She started to sob again. Then sniffed loudly. ‘And what kind of police are you? What did you say?’

  ‘We investigate the police,’ said Mathieson.

  ‘Issues that the police have,’ softened Bannon. ‘Because your husband was a police officer we have a special protocol for cases like this.’

  ‘So what was he doing out that night? Practising being a detective?’ Mathieson was incredulous. ‘Or vigilantism?’

  ‘He wanted to join the CID, he was doing surveillance, he was learning, trying to develop more skills. He said that everybody at work was in a holding pattern waiting for vacancies, that nobody was moving anywhere. Everybody was in this holding pattern,’ she repeated as if her repetition made it true, ‘and he had applied for a transfer three times, been turned down for numerous training courses. We have three kids, we needed the money. He needed to get on.’

  ‘And what was he doing to get extra money?’ fired Mathieson, her mind leaping on the pure cocaine found at the scene.

  The slap was quick and vicious; Isla was off the settee and over to Mathieson like a panther, the blow hit her right on the cheek. Bannon was slow to react, trying to reel in Isla’s arm where the hand had connected with eye-watering impact.

  ‘How dare you! He wasn’t doing anything to get extra money,’ she hissed. ‘He was doing a job that you should have done, and he was helping to get evidence on somebody.’

  Mathieson looked at the palm of her own hand then raised it to her cheek, then checked it for blood. Finding none, she brushed her hands together, her stare fixed on Isla with a condescending look. That was the one line bent cops gave all their dull little wives, stupid women who were kept at home and were far too trusting. But this conversation had gone too far, too quickly. She looked at Bannon.

  ‘Isla, blood was found nearby on the loch side. He might be injured, there was cocaine present, as if he had been taking it.’

  ‘No,’ said Isla bluntly. ‘Not him.’

  ‘We have to go where the evidence takes us
. Maybe Donnie had got wind of a deal and wanted to be present, to make sure before he made it official. He might have been testing the drug,’ Bannon suggested.

  She shook her head, and then seemed to collapse. ‘He’s not that stupid.’

  Mathieson was losing patience. ‘Isla, we need permission to look at your bank accounts, your credit cards, anything your husband—’

  ‘His name was Donnie and you can do what you want. Look around you, we have enough, we don’t have an extravagant lifestyle.’

  ‘Some might call a cocaine habit an extravagant lifestyle?’ asked Mathieson.

  ‘Donnie doesn’t even drink.’

  ‘There was alcohol found at the scene.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he drank it.’

  ‘Can you think why it might be there? If not for Donnie, then who?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ Isla wrapped her arms round herself. ‘You should be out looking for him, he could be in all kinds of trouble. Look at these poor bastards out in Yemen. Just look at the news? Why are you here? Go out and look for him? Please. I need to phone my mum, I’ll need help with the kids. This is the worst nightmare, so you can do what you want, look where you want. I really don’t care, but leave me and my kids alone.’

  ‘Do you want to be here when we search the house?’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘And are you sure it was work that night? The phone call he got?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it always was.’

  ‘So this project he was involved in, this evidence he was gathering …’ Bannon phrased the question carefully. It was the one question that Isla had not answered. ‘Had it been happening a lot, these phone calls?’

  ‘Recently, yes,’ she sniffed.

  ‘And how long had these calls and texts and night meetings been going on?’

  Isla shrugged. ‘Not before the Braithwaite case, only after that. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell me what it was about so it must have been a police matter.’

  ‘Or he was having an affair,’ suggested Mathieson.

  Bannon rolled his eyes in disbelief.

  ‘Do you want another slap?’ retorted Isla. She turned to Bannon, obviously seeing him as her ally. ‘It was something to do with the Braithwaite case. I’ve told you Donnie was first on the scene when that wee baby was found.’

  ‘Was there anybody he was talking about, anybody whose name he started mentioning, somebody he hadn’t mentioned before?’

  ‘Like some cocaine drug overlord he had started working for on the quiet? Nipping off to Columbia on a Tuesday night to pick up God knows what. My husband is missing so can you please look for him. You are supposed to be looking after him, you … people.’

  ‘And that’s what we are doing, Isla. We need to know what was going through his mind. Have you heard him mention anybody he didn’t speak of before, a strange name dropped in conversation?’

  Isla tried to think. ‘Well, Colin Anderson for one, because of the baby, Baby Moses. That entire Blue Neptune thing was on his mind, so the Braithwaite name. And then because of that he had been talking to Costello.’

  Mathieson nodded. Well, that was two police officers missing.

  ‘Jack called me,’ lied Valerie as the lift appeared with a delicate ping. ‘He’s one of the pathologists. We work together a lot, and he knows Costello and I are friends.’

  In mutual unspoken consent they walked along a corridor past the nurses’ station, the girl there looked up, smiled at Hannah, gave Valerie a quick once over and no doubt concluded that the woman with the scraped-back hair in the green coat who walked past, throwing her an officious glare, was somebody in authority and she went back to her own paperwork before the woman in the green coat gave her any more.

  The unknown woman was in the last room in the corridor, by design or by chance, tucked away from the buzz of the main atrium. Hannah knocked on the door and swung it open; the woman was standing by the window looking across the giant foyer of the hospital watching visitors, nurses and patients walking past or queuing for good coffee, grabbing a takeaway that was more edible than the hospital food, She stayed looking out, taking her time to turn around, and waiting until the two sets of feet had come into her room and stopped moving. Tying her housecoat further round her waist, she slowly turned to face her visitors, her face blackened round the eyes, her expression still wary.

  Hannah saw the flicker of recognition on her face when she saw the dark-haired woman beside her. Not a look that encompassed any affection, or any fear, just recognition. A work colleague, just as she had suspected. But not close friends.

  ‘That’s great, Hannah, if you can leave us for a couple of minutes,’ said Valerie, in a voice that knew it would be obeyed.

  ‘Don’t stress her, she’s not very strong,’ said Hannah, noticing a lack of hello or any type of greeting between them.

  ‘I think she might be a lot stronger than you think,’ replied Valerie, looking at the pale face, the grey eyes and the crescent shaped scar on the hairline. It was definitely her.

  ‘Costello?’

  The face looked back at her blankly, but the eyes narrowed slightly.

  ‘You know who I am, right?’

  The thin lips moved, thinking, searching in her mind for an answer, more recognition should come, some placement. But she knew.

  And Valerie knew she knew.

  The patient shook her head. ‘I know I don’t like you.’ It was tempered with a slight smile.

  ‘You know Archie Walker?’ Valerie got out her phone and showed her a photograph, Archie looking very neat and dapper in a bow tie at some fiscal’s dinner.

  Costello took it and looked at the picture for a long time. ‘I don’t like him either.’ She handed the phone back.

  ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘I don’t trust anybody.’

  Valerie felt very calm and very in control, she was enjoying the feeling. ‘Well, I am your best bet. I have to make something right. I have really fucked up, Costello, I have really fucked it up. And I need help.’

  ‘Join the club.’

  ‘I need your car.’

  Morna took another sip of her coffee, how much caffeine could one human being take before their head exploded? Had anybody ever done any research into that? It would be much more interesting than the sex life of fruit flies or transplanting ears from a mouse’s head to its bum and then back again. She had been here for nearly ten hours now, not really doing very much apart from musing on bits of information from her notebook, and running the items of clothes through her mind, seeing if there was any more information to be had there. Nothing ever stopped at her, nothing that might be of interest to her or any help in identifying the young man lying in his room. But he was breathing, being attended to, pipes and tubes being changed, readings taken. Their frequency had started at every ten minutes, then twenty, then half an hour, but not any less frequent than that. Morna presumed that any movement in that direction was positive, so she wasn’t going to stop being optimistic. He had got through the difficult initial hours. Like those first few breaths of life, they were the most dangerous. As some wag had added, the last few breaths of life were pretty dodgy as well.

  Along at the nurses’ station the girls were busy, doing their job for their masters. All part of the important chain, but how often did they see the beginning and the middle and the end? How often did they have a good idea and the boss shot them down, even if the suggestion was sensible, they were stupid to have voiced the opinion in the first place. How much worse was it when the boss was a woman?

  She was lucky to have Alastair Patrick. He might be a monosyllabic stern-faced bastard, but he was that to everybody, nobody got treated to special sarcasm or an icy glare. They all got it. Except maybe, wee Finn. Alastair and Wilma had given Finn a lovely Christmas present; a light sabre and they never forgot his birthday. The boss never mentioned any family, which always made her wonder.

  The
girls at the nurses’ station had offered her biscuits, a grateful patient had come back with a tray of nuts and dried fruit. They had included Morna in the share-out, made her another coffee, asking if anybody knew who the young man was yet. She answered that they were working on a couple of leads. They had taken that as spiel for ‘no’ and gone about their business.

  She had taken the coffee back to sit outside his room, then as the hours went past and anybody who could give her a row had left, she crept inside to watch him breathe.

  She pulled out the brown paper bags with his clothes. It looked increasingly like she was dropping them off, rather than them being picked up. Looking through them, she stopped at the Fair Isle jumper again, thinking who had knitted it for him. His mum? She had an idea, something she had seen on the tele. She got out her mobile phone and, wearing gloves she examined the elbows of the jumper, then the cuffs under the light of her mobile phone with the magnification right up. And saw a few small orange fibres. She looked through the rest of the clothes, only finding a few more round the ankle portion of the socks. Folding the bags back up she tried to think. Then thought she wasn’t paid enough to do that and tried to get through to Forensics Services, knowing the significance of cuffs and ankles, places of exposure. Places that could pick up transfer.

  She could … The door opened. ‘Fed up with you bloody cops hanging around here.’ The nurse was tired and sounded more than a little angry.

  ‘Try it from my point of view,’ said Morna, restacking the brown bag.

  ‘Do you have to be here all the time, do you ever go home? You have been here for hours.’