The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  And she had. Once the nurse had left, Morna got on the phone and tried to explain to Neil that he’d have to get Finn tonight, she was staying at work. As usual, she only got his voicemail. So she phoned Lachlan.

  SEVEN

  Tuesday, 28th of November

  It was going to be a very long day, a very cold and wet, long, long day.

  Wyngate was back on site at first light.

  Mulholland had produced a missing person’s report that might interest them, only because the report matched something that Ahern had said in his statement, about students coming up and monitoring the loch from the viewpoint. Ahern didn’t know any specific times or dates but he recognized the name Kieran Cowan as that of a tall gangly lad who drove an old campervan. He’d seen it a few times but had no idea of the plate number.

  The report said Cowan was a student of environmental biology. He was doing a project, a self-styled filming project of nocturnal activity at the loch. It was his preferred hideout that had caught the interest of the station desk staff when it was reported; the viewing site at the north-west bank of the loch.

  So why was the only vehicle unaccounted for registered to a cop called Donald McCaffrey? That Mini Clubman had been there for more than thirty-six hours. Mulholland had traced the VW camper that Cowan was known to be driving. It was registered to his dad, a Mr David Cowan. But there was no sign of it around here, which suggested if he left the loch side, it was by his own vehicle. Had he taken the missing police officer with him? Cowan had no criminal record. A quick ring around his family, concerned friends and lecturers, painted a picture of a Corbynite, pint-drinking environmentalist with a passion for wild camping. The type to rant about dead wallabies.

  It looked now as though he might have run into trouble himself.

  Mulholland addressed the volunteers from the university, friends and colleagues of Kieran Cowan that had assembled on the loch side. They were keen to find out what had happened to him. They were young and fuelled by nervous enthusiasm, although nobody knew what they were looking for. Anything that belonged to him. They needed a much wider search than the police had already carried out and they needed it to be thorough.

  Mulholland had heard the mention of a camera more than once. Cowan had not returned it to the university and that was very unlike him.

  His camera? Mulholland had queried.

  Most of them had seen it or borrowed it themselves. It was a special low light Macro Scub 4. Cowan had probably been wearing a photographer’s waistcoat that night, pockets full of batteries and extra memory cards, wipes and brushes. In his bag would be two bars of chocolate, a flask of soup and a packet of hankies. His routine was well known to his friends, he was a young man who was known to stick to his ‘routine’.

  There was the usual early-morning chaos in Colin Anderson’s kitchen, it resembled a café. Again.

  Peter looked at his dad, then looked away. Paige even managed a half smile then slid out of her chair, taking a cup of coffee with her and disappeared upstairs. Claire and her boyfriend David had stopped talking, even Moses, still in his basket on the kitchen table, decided to stay stumm and settled for chewing his lip.

  ‘I think you had better sit down,’ said Brenda.

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  Brenda gestured that he should sit, then she slid Claire’s tablet across the table top to him, through the obstacle course of marmalade and jam jars, and dirty coffee cups. Claire, or more likely David, had a subscription to a daily newspaper. The picture on the screen was one he was familiar with. Costello, coming out of court the day she had given evidence in the Bernadette Kissel case. He read the piece hardly believing what he was reading. They had got it all, her background and who her father was, who her brother was.

  ‘Oh my God, how the hell did they get hold of that?’

  Brenda laid a hand across his shoulders, giving him some solace before she sat down and looked at the screen.

  ‘It looks as if the knives are out for her,’ consoled Brenda, with no hint of relish in her voice, though there was a time, not so long ago, when she would have taken great pride in reading this.

  ‘It’s all here. It more or less says she’s responsible for … well, for everything but the Vietnam War. A colleague missing, a young family man, Costello forty-two-year-old spinster. And it finishes with a very nasty little line saying she isn’t coming forward to defend herself.’

  ‘Which worries me. Why isn’t she?’ He looked at who wrote it, not surprised at all to see that it was Karen Jones. Bloody bitch. He wondered who her sources were and, as he calmed down, why she had been so one-sided about the piece. She had given a full page spread to the lack of movement on the Monkey House Of Horror, written with the slant of Costello being first on the scene, who her brother was, and the fact that her current whereabouts were unknown.

  At the bottom was a picture of George and Valerie, hugging, united in their grief and their search for the murderer. In it, Valerie looked much older, her clothes more suited to a woman twice her age.

  Brenda pointed a very clean fingernail to the paragraph stating she remains in contact with a fiscal office. There was a picture of Archie Walker and a picture of George Haggerty, the caption underneath him said that he had been on the receiving end of a personal vendetta. And the way it was written, it sounded as if there had indeed been something personal. Especially from DI Costello. The three of them, Haggerty looking young, dark sweeping hair and very handsome. The picture of Costello looked awful, like she was a wrung-out rag.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Colin?’ Brenda sat down and placed a cup of steaming black coffee in front of him. ‘Calm down. This has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘That wee shit was in this house on Sunday night and he goes and does this! Bloody hell, it says here that “a source close to the investigation has revealed her involvement with drink and cocaine”. What?’

  ‘Did Archie know Valerie was the kind of drunk the papers are making her out to be? No, he didn’t, not at the time. Costello is from a family of alcoholics, she deals with scum every day of her life. She found those bodies, who knows what effect that has had on her?’

  ‘I don’t believe you just said that,’ Anderson snapped at his wife. ‘You really think she would have something to do with cocaine?’

  ‘No, but maybe she just can’t cope any more. Maybe she’s had enough. And when you find her, you should hug her, you owe her a lot.’ She kissed him on the top of his head. ‘You owe her an awful lot.’

  Then his mobile started ringing following by the house phone.

  Colin looked at the number on his mobile recognizing at once that it was Mathilda McQueen. Brenda watched as Colin listened. She could hear the chatter but not make out what the forensic scientist was actually saying.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, his face pale. He listened again. ‘Should you be telling me this? I don’t want you to get into trouble. But thanks.’

  There was no more chit-chat. He ended the call.

  ‘Well, the police have a leak somewhere. You know that search going on up at the loch. They have found blood, cocaine and some alcohol. There is a mix of blood. A sample from a young police officer called Donnie McCaffrey.’

  ‘The man who found Moses?’ Brenda turned to look at the baby; recognizing the name as the man who stayed at the hospital with him when Moses had his breathing trouble.

  Colin nodded. ‘And another, blood from another person. Only two sources of blood, two sources of DNA. Male and female. The female sample is from Costello.’

  ‘Oh, Colin, I am so, so sorry.’

  Archie Walker was the obvious person to have on the scene. The fact that he shouldn’t have been allowed due to his relationship with Costello was not mentioned. When he was determined, the chief fiscal was a man you didn’t want to cross.

  ‘We have a cop and student reported missing, and another cop we can’t find. We were missing one camper van, now located. It appears undamaged.
And we have the Mini Clubman also with no signs of damage. And they all have a last seen on Saturday night; Cowan’s flat mate, McCaffrey’s wife and Costello’s neighbour. So, did a flying saucer come down and abduct them?’

  The camper had been found three miles up the lochside road, tucked into an off-road lay-by. It had been phoned in on the non-emergency number. A van driver for a luggage transfer company, who pulled into that lay-by every day, had seen the vehicle there for three days in a row.

  ‘I’ll send Anderson out to have a look at the van, it might hold evidence.’ At some point, something terrible had happened. Donnie McCaffrey had suffered some kind of injury that made him bleed and they now knew Costello had been bleeding too.

  But there was an outside chance that the situation had been filmed and the camera had caught something of the events that night, witnessed it in some way. One guy, Neil, who ran HikeLite the luggage transfer company, had been out to this site before, and to the Loch Lomond campsite on a weekly basis. He had shown them where Cowan liked to be, up on the highest point of the hill. He had gestured this from the car park. He was pointing exactly to where the most blood had been found. Mulholland and Wyngate had instigated another search, this time for the camera, following all the exit routes from the monument.

  Mulholland looked at the motley crew of volunteers, being told to keep in a straight line and go slowly.

  They moved off as soon as the light was full although even then they still used torches, the line of twenty bodies advanced steadily and methodically.

  A full hour had passed, when somebody on the high part of the land had pointed over to the water. Up until then, every shout had been a false call but the cop was dispatched to go and look anyway.

  It was a volunteer. He waded into the shallows, bent over and picked something out, holding it high above his head with a thumbs-up. A camera.

  ‘That’s bloody useful, it’s been in the water for nearly two days now,’ said Wyngate looking crestfallen.

  ‘It’s a marine camera,’ muttered Mulholland. ‘It’s waterproof, you muppet.’

  Valerie watched the door close in front of her. Mrs Craig, Costello’s neighbour, was away to get the spare key. The old biddy was very picky about who she gave it out to. She thought Valerie was Costello’s boss in some way, which Valerie supposed she was.

  The little old dear was making a great play of giving Valerie a loan of the key for Costello’s flat, leaving Valerie, who had introduced herself as a colleague from the fiscals’ office, free rein. The old dear had glanced at the ID and twaddled off to get the keys.

  As Valerie waited, she walked over to the window of the flat’s hall. A nice flat right down by the riverside. It must have cost her a bob or two, this place. The hallway was carpeted; the window clean and free of bugs, there was a small wooden table under the window adorned by a couple of plants. She placed her hand over one, noting that the tremor in her fingers had gone. It came and went, she supposed as she dried out. Or at least cut her drinking down.

  Who was she kidding?

  If the tremor ever went away completely, she’d feel odd without it, the shake had been there for so long. The leaf of the plant stayed still as she caressed it, soft and velvety under her fingers. Somebody was making a little home here. Not Costello, not from what Valerie had heard about her; she sounded hard-nosed and career driven. But then she seemed to have a soft side too; Costello looked in on this old woman every morning, making sure she was OK. Mrs Craig had raised the alarm the minute Costello had not returned home. She was the only one who had thought to call the police.

  Archie, not Costello, had said Costello’s mum and gran had both been drinkers. Costello knew the signs and was very anti-drink, which might explain the disdain with which the cop had greeted her with at the hospital yesterday. Valerie hadn’t thought much about vodka today, she felt busy and purposeful.

  She leaned forward and pressed her head against the glass, looking over the city sky, a much flatter city than Edinburgh. It looked more built up, she could see the cityscape for miles, flattening away into the distance, the darkness above and the bright lights down below, distorted into stars by the glass, it looked like the world had turned upside down.

  She felt a tap on her shoulder.

  Mrs Craig was dangling a fob with a St Andrews flag on it. ‘Here’s the key for you, pet.’

  Morna woke, thinking the man had moved, a subtle change she had caught out the corner of her eye. She sat and watched him, from her seat in the corner. But now he was still once more, as if he had been playing statues with her. Overnight she had received an email; they had found an abandoned vehicle down near Loch Lomond, Patrick himself was going down there to oversee any evidence gained from the vehicle and the local force were securing the locus until he got there.

  She pulled her seat over to the bed, and rubbed her eyes, studying him more closely.

  He looked better, he seemed in less pain, as if his head felt better and the tension had gone, allowing him to breathe a little easier. The painkillers winning their battle against the pain receptors in the brain.

  She pulled her chair closer still; it was getting light outside. She took his hand. His skin was warm and clammy. Her own fingers seemed cold and podgy next to his. He had long slender fingers covered in fine wiry dark hairs that matched those on his chest, the little tuft of hair that peeked out from the wires that crossed his chest and lay on the neck of his hospital gown. The little pieces of tape on his throat looked like snowflakes. The bandage round his head looked comical, cartoon-like almost, wound round and round like he was a mummy.

  How would she feel if this was her boy? If this was Finn a few years on, caught like this, attacked when alone. Somebody had cut his throat, then battered him with a blunt instrument, stripped him of his jacket, then stripped him of his identity, only to leave him on top of the most dangerous road in Scotland. So why would somebody do that?

  She rubbed the back of his hand gently.

  At some point Patrick had woken her with a call and reported that there were now four young men reported missing who fitted this young man’s description. Two from Glasgow, one from Aberdeen and one from Sutherland. He was getting further details. Her brief remained the same, sit tight and monitor him. Record anything and everything.

  She’d need to call Neil again. Or Lachlan. It seemed DCI Patrick was determined to stop her going home.

  She realized she was murmuring out loud. ‘So, enough of me. What happened to you?’

  He murmured something back, not to her specifically but some words came out, in the ether and to the world.

  ‘Sorry?’ she said, not sure if she had heard. ‘Did you say something?’

  It was quieter and more mumbled the second time. By the end of the word his breath was already tailing off, too much effort.

  ‘You were attacked. You are in hospital, but I guess you have worked that out for yourself by now.’

  The breathing changed rhythm slightly. He was waiting on the next bit, a pause between the in breath and gentle exhale.

  ‘Well, you got a whack on the head and a few more on your face—’ she left out the bit about the slit throat – ‘and then somebody dumped you in the middle of nowhere but—’

  He was trying to say something.

  Was it Finn?

  Was he trying to say Finn?

  Did he know her?

  Did he know her son?

  She tried to halt the palpitations in her chest. Finn had been left with Lachlan, and then her mother would have arrived, and then Neil would have come home. In any case, Lachlan would make sure Finn would be OK. There would be a similar pattern today. Her son was safe, which is more than she could say for the young man lying in front of her. She had heard wrong. ‘Don’t get stressed. But it was so cold, you didn’t bleed the way you should, so you are going to be fine.’ She lifted her hand off him for a moment and crossed her fingers hoping she was telling the truth. ‘All the vessels contracted, you see, so t
hat prevents blood loss and, on top of that, you have a wee bleed on your brain but they put a wee clip to hold it until it heals properly. My gran had one of them in her head for ages and she did OK.’

  ‘Finn …’ The word drifted slowly on his outward breath.

  ‘Finn?’ she repeated.

  ‘Cam …’

  ‘Cam? Is your name Cam? Campbell? Cameron?’

  ‘Cam … Finn.’ His head rolled a little, flicking backwards and forwards in frustration. Then the hand gripped hers.

  ‘Finn or Cameron?’ She felt stupid, she could sense his frustration, see it in the way his eyes stayed closed, but the eyelids kept flickering. This was stressing him.

  Then he started to breathe deeply again, fallen asleep, floating back into himself, away to get better where they couldn’t chase him anymore. It was up to her now.

  ‘It’s OK. I’ve got that,’ she told him, lying into his ear. ‘Rest well.’

  Morna scrolled through the list of possible matches. Two had been drunk and had left a party at the weekend and not come back yet, Morna knew that was a bit worrying in the city but out here it was a death sentence. There were two missing person reports from Edinburgh and Sutherland. If the Sutherland boy was out in this weather exposed, he’d be dead by now. It wasn’t uncommon. Nor was it uncommon to have too much to drink and stagger off a harbour wall into the inky depths.

  She scrolled down, looking at the other two; the Glaswegians. One was a cop missing at a crime scene. She had to read that again. Why had that not hit the newspapers? It might have but she had not seen anything other than this room for the last day and a half.

  The other one was a student, from Glasgow University. She read the ‘last seen’, her eyes catching on the fact he had been last seen going out the door of his flat with a film camera. Having had a quick look at the description, the weight and height seemed to match. They matched those of the cop as well, she reminded herself. She closed her phone and rubbed it against her chin. ‘Kieran?’ She enquired of the body. ‘Donnie?’