by Caro Ramsay
By foot.
And every route she picked went over the Kelvindale Bridge to the footpath. Valerie shook her head, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. She could figure this out; she had the skills to do this. That was far behind the house, streets away, a long walk from the front of the house in Balcarres Avenue and Valerie knew from her professional experience how closely that CCTV had been examined. So what was Costello doing, looking at the bridge? A footbridge behind the house, at the far end of the estate.
Looking at the internet history on the laptop and a document Costello had called ‘The Sideman’, she started tracing the detective’s thoughts. The Sideman?
Valerie picked her phone up and Googled that. The feeling of her fingertip on the screen, familiar and comforting. It reminded her of doing her job. The Urban Dictionary said sideman meant an irrelevant and powerless guy. She swiped down reading the more formal definition; an instrumentalist supporting a soloist or a principal performer.
Costello had called this whole file The Sideman. Had she known, or suspected, the presence of another man there? She read on, her brain starting to spark with unanswered questions. Costello’s theory was that the sideman had been in the car when George drove in to the garage. George had gone into the house, the sideman had stayed in the garage. George got a phone call to go north, which gave him an unbreakable alibi. The sideman had come out the garage and entered the house. Did he have a key? Or had Abigail been called and told to expect him? Was that what the phone call was about? Valerie thought what that call might sound like. The house was close to the hospital. So X’s mum has been admitted to Gartnavel. I’ve told X he can pop in and get some kip. He’ll be exhausted after the drive down from Port MacDuff. Was that what the phone call had said? Then he killed them. According to Costello’s route, he had exited via the back garden, a long walk through the streets then over the river. And away.
Had it been that simple?
Had it all really been that simple?
So who was he?
The brown and cream Volkswagen camper was parked in the innermost corner of the long lay-by, hidden by bushes, keeping its secrets to itself. It sat a little out from the verge of wet grass as if somebody in good shoes was going to be getting out the passenger door maybe to stretch their legs or to photograph a lovely sunset over the treetops in the wood behind.
DCI Alastair Patrick paused for a moment looking at the sky, then at his feet, as if there might be some answers there. The younger uniformed cop stood back and left him to it. It had taken him two minutes to judge that the DCI from Port MacDuff was a quiet man and that he was not one to be provoked to idle conversation. He watched as Patrick leaned against the front of the VW and checked the number plate.
‘Definitely his car.’ Patrick nodded and gestured that whatever silent machinations he had been turning over in his head were now over. He turned as a BMW pulled into the lay-by. The uniformed officer stood, arm out telling the driver that there was nothing to see here and would he kindly drive on. A tall fair-haired man got out the car, already showing his warrant card.
He approached the camper, passing a wry smile to the junior officer. He pulled on a pair of gloves as he passed.
The quiet man turned to greet him, lifting his cap. ‘It’s Colin Anderson, isn’t it?’
‘Indeed.’ Anderson was at a loss.
‘DCI Patrick. Port MacDuff. My DC thinks you are the best thing since sliced bread.’
‘He doesn’t know me then?’ Anderson was finding it hard to read this small, wiry man with his cold stare and purposeful posture. Just looking at him made Anderson feel like a slob.
‘She. DC Morna Taverner. She is looking after a young man in Raigmore Hospital. We think he was the driver of this vehicle. We are covering the same ground here.’
‘Really.’ Anderson wished he had had some more sleep, he wasn’t catching on.
‘A man with his throat cut and his first words are “camera” and “film”. We phoned that in and were told that you already have recovered a Scub from the loch. This man witnessed what went on at the lochside. I’m sure of it.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Kieran Cowan, student, lives in the west end of Glasgow. No criminal record, nothing untoward about him. Except why did he stop? Why here? To answer his phone? Mechanical failure? To meet somebody? Who slit his throat? How did he get to the summit of the Bealach? It’s about 160 miles from here. I asked for an abandoned vehicle check of a twenty-mile radius, it should have been two hundred.’
Anderson looked through the driver’s window. ‘And who?’
‘Whoever.’
‘Meeting somebody he knew?’ Anderson stood back, trying to find an innocent explanation for the camper being here, abandoned. Why had Cowan walked away? What happened to McCaffrey? And Costello? He couldn’t bear to think they were looking for another body. Two bodies. The thought made him chill.
‘Family reported him missing. He had been away filming so they left it twenty-four hours plus, thinking he’d got carried away.’ Patrick’s gloved fingers rattled on the roof of the vehicle.
‘Did he tell his friends or family what he was doing?’ asked Anderson.
‘They said he was looking for criminal activity against the wallabies, he was headed for the car park at Inveruglass. Where McCaffrey’s car was found.’
Where their blood had been found.
Patrick’s bright blue eyes looked straight through Anderson. This is nothing to do with wallabies.
‘Your DC?’ asked Anderson.
‘Morna Taverner? Very good, she was talking about booking you a room at the Exciseman. She suspects you will be coming north, I think she’s right.’
‘News to me.’ Anderson tapped on the window.
‘It’ll be worth your while.’
‘Was Morna the one who called me about the Logan and Witherspoon rapes?’
‘She would have phoned you about the Barnes and Sixsmith attacks,’ Patrick answered, making his point. ‘You two should get together and feed your obsessions. And while you are at it, see if you can cure her of her terminal clumsiness. A car smash and two nasty falls.’
Anderson looked at him puzzled, then went back to looking through the window, holding his hand up against the glass on the back passenger window to protect the glass from the rain to afford him a better view. ‘He locked the vehicle before he left it.’
Patrick looked around at the hills, the darkening sky. ‘What happened? Did the three of them go away in the missing Fiat?’
‘Costello wouldn’t drive two bleeding bodies around, and she was injured too. So where is the Fiat and who brought the camper here?’
‘Good question. We got hold of the mum, she’s bringing spare keys up here, but that will take time. And we need to talk to her about the identity of our young victim.’ Patrick hitched up his trouser legs then got down on the ground to look under the car.
The power pendulum had swung again; Anderson was back in charge now. ‘And how long does it take to drive from here to the Applecross pass?’
‘The Bealach Na Ba?’ Patrick wiped his palm over his eyes, trying to see something, then got out his mobile as he was wriggling in the ground, pulling his gloves from his fingers with his teeth. ‘Three hours, three and a half from here? Can be five from the city. The roads are good until the last thirty miles or so. Somebody forced him to stop. And abducted him.’ The blue eyes narrowed, looking back along the road to the turn off for the loch. ‘Agreed?’
‘Agreed. So, what do you think? There are no skid marks on the road. It looks like he left the vehicle of his own free will? Did he run out of petrol? Was he flagged down by somebody in trouble?’
‘No, he would have pulled the camper in behind the other vehicle. This is parked up at the corner. And why would he take his bag out for that? Why did he leave his camera at the locus? Was he filming and somebody thought he had caught something incriminating on film? So then he got to his car and drove away … but then
what? Why get out again?’ He looked around him, over to the trees. ‘He had pine needles on the shoes, his knees and his hair. And gravel in the palms of his hands.’
Anderson looked to the left and the right, and to the forestry commission woods. Then down.
‘Morna said his cuffs smelled of oil or something. Was he crouching, feeling under the car? Then what, he ran away? Was chased away?’
‘Should we wait for crime scene?’ Anderson was looking around the tarmac of the lay-by, which told him nothing, no skid marks, no stains, no tyre marks. But Patrick was now studying it like he was reading the small print of a contract.
‘It’ll take time for them to get here. It’s our force who is dealing with it and Inverness aren’t going to stick this on their budget. There’s no CCTV cameras out here, are there? I tried to order the footage from the four nearest for the four hours after eight p.m. on Saturday night but you lot have them.’
‘There’s none at the loch either, the cameras were trained on the shore after the issue with the wallabies but I’ll hurry it up for you and see if anybody was giving him aggro on the road,’ said Anderson.
‘They made him stop. I know how I would do it. If you know beforehand that you want to disable a car. It’s a bit like hobbling a donkey. It’ll go but it won’t get far,’ said Patrick with something that resembled a shrug. ‘I’m presuming no access to the engine, so it has to be covert.’ He walked back to the vehicle and put the torch on his mobile phone back on, then knelt on the ground, swinging the light, making a square of it tracking the outer border of the vehicle’s body. ‘Over there, the front wheel arch, above that.’
Anderson walked round the car and knelt down, putting his arm up, feeling along the wheel arch, as Patrick told him to move his hand towards the front of the car.
‘You’re on it.’
‘It feels like part of the car.’ He tried to pull off the metal box he could feel but it didn’t move.
‘Try sliding it,’ suggested Patrick.
The box gave way with familiar release and repel of a magnet.
It was a small tin, an old tobacco tin. Anderson held it up to Patrick who merely nodded as if it was no more than he would have expected.
‘And how does that stop a car?’
‘A few heavy ball bearings, fill it with warm candle wax, then stick a magnet on the top, close it and attach that to the bare metal on the inside of the engine casing.’ He looked at Anderson, raising an eyebrow. ‘Then the heat of the engine melts the wax and the ball bearings start to clatter around, the person stops. It’s a much loved old vehicle, he would have stopped. And I think somebody was following. Hector will tell us.’
‘Who’s Hector, your great crime scene guy? We have a great forensic scientist here, Mathilda McQueen, nothing gets past her.’
Patrick walked back towards the Land Rover. ‘Not much gets past Hector, well, not anything edible. He’s a very fat spaniel,’ said Patrick and Anderson was left to take of that what he could. ‘I’ll see you at the pub later.’
NINE
Wednesday, 29th of November
Anderson was so tired his headache now would not go away, it pounded incessantly behind his right ear. His eyes were dry, he was hungry but he had no appetite. All because of that wee bundle of peachy loveliness that cried in this basket. Moses had been quiet for an hour between three and four o’clock but apart from that, all Anderson could remember was noise. He had stayed in the kitchen, but he hadn’t got as far as sleep when Moses started crying. Claire, her boyfriend David, and the ever-present Paige, had stayed in the front room, watching a documentary about Charles Manson, and eating a Chinese takeaway and Doritos. He had heard Claire and David arguing the toss about why people had followed Manson so blindly. And would it all fade to memory now that he was dead? Unlikely. He might have gone but the memories live on. The horror of it.
As he passed the door, sometime after midnight, on his way to the downstairs toilet, he heard Paige ask, ‘So who is Charles Manson anyway?’
Now it was about half four. He walked into the kitchen where Brenda was preparing some milk formula. She was muttering over her shoulder to Moses who was in his basket on the big kitchen table, kicking his legs, wanting his covers away. They had a brief conversation, a weird conversation, like all their engagements nowadays. They now lived together in the same house because of Moses. They couldn’t stay together for their own children but they could for a step-grandchild. Brenda was seeing another man, Anderson had met him twice in the passing. He was an accountant called Roger who, being wary kept out of Anderson’s way, but he seemed to make Brenda happy – which is more than he himself had managed to do for the last few years.
Brenda turned and smiled. ‘I can handle this, I think he has wind.’
‘So do I after eating that Chinese. I can’t sleep.’
‘Well, go and do some work then, that’s what you always used to do.’
It was a pointed jab, but mildly delivered. He smiled. ‘I’ll try to get some sleep before I need to go,’ and he went back to his bed and lay there, listening to the noises of people in his house. Like when Claire and Peter were young. Day turns into night and back into day.
He picked up an old Henning Mankell he kept starting but he couldn’t get in to it. He took out his tablet and flicked through a few emails, seeing the one from Morna Taverner, with its attachment. The files of a rape – had she said rapes or attacks? – that she wanted him to look at, an enthusiastic rookie. He read on, thinking about them as he looked at his watch; he’d had two hours sleep. She had included Sally Logan in her list, he pondered on the one fact that had always bothered him about her attack. Who would know she was there? On a Scottish hill at six on a summer morning, not somewhere you’d be – unless you had a reason to be there. Or prior knowledge that your victim was going to be there. Anderson decided he’d go into work early. He had a few things of his own he wanted to look up, starting with the employment and human resource history of one Morna Ann Taverner nee MacDonald.
Valerie looked at the red and white brick building, an old house, a big house that had once had a child and a family, kids played in that garden and the trees at the back had swings attached to them in a previous life. But for as long as Valerie could recall, it had been a GPs surgery. Abigail used to say, as they waited in their dad’s car at the traffic lights on Crookston Road, that she would work there one day and heal the sick. That was Abigail, she always had grand ideas. Valerie really only ever wanted to go into law and make money. She didn’t want to be all holistic, healing people and getting complete strangers to feel better about themselves.
That was Abigail all over; she had worked all during her marriage to Oscar. The bold but unlucky Oscar. Then Abigail had married George and it had all gone a bit … well, she had to think of the word. Quiet? Abigail had ceased to be Abigail. She had become George’s wife. Valerie had thought at first that it was her sister treading lightly in a new marriage after the tragic loss of her first husband at sea.
Oscar was only presumed dead. Only presumed. The unwelcome thought had been pointed out to her with crystal clarity by Costello and her blackened eyes. They had never found the body, just the Jennifer Rhu burning, the painter attaching the dinghy half undone as if Oscar nearly managed to detach it but had failed to escape the flames. What was left of the yacht had still been burning when the coastguard had arrived.
Another one who had gone to heaven in a little rowing boat.
Abigail had been shattered by losing Oscar but had seemed keen to get married again. She wanted a father for Mary Jane. And then she had met George who, like Oscar, came from Port MacDuff. In fact, it might have been at the memorial service for Oscar that Abigail first met George. Valerie had searched for a memory. She must have been there but she could only recall swigging back a good white wine and then doing her teeth in the loo after she had been sick, filling the toilet bowl with sausage rolls and mushroom vol-au-vents. She had a very clear memory of that.
>
Abigail and George had bonded over the loss of a husband and a friend. At first Valerie thought it was the thrill of the new husband, George does this and George thinks that, then Valerie came to realize that Abigail had simply changed. She had challenged her about it, of course, and Abigail had said in that way of hers, that in retrospect was slightly nervous, that she was, for the first time in her life, relaxing. George made good money, and there would be a payout from Oscar’s life insurance once seven years had passed and he could legally be declared dead. So there was no pressure on her to work, she had loved her adopted daughter, of course, but now she had a son of her own with George and that was special. And that sounded like all the roses in the garden were lovely, with no thorns at all. So why was George disappearing up to Port MacDuff at the slightest opportunity?
Costello wanted to know how much insurance Abigail carried. The house had already been valued. George was quick to think about getting it on the market.
Was it all about money?
She glanced at her watch now, unfamiliar on her wrist. She had been invited to a meeting at the cop shop tomorrow morning but she was not prepared to face that fascist wee bitch again. Time to dance to a different tune now.
She walked up to the door and opened it; a receptionist looked up, a universal smile. ‘Have you got an appointment? We are not actually open yet.’
‘Dr Irene Marshall. She is expecting me for a chat, I am not a patient.’
‘Oh?’
‘I am Abigail’s sister, Dr Haggerty’s sister.’
‘Oh.’ The professional face immediately collapsed into one of concern, her eyes began to well up, a manicured hand went up to her mouth. ‘I am so, so sorry, you must be Valerie.’
She nodded, thinking that this was the first person who had shown any real emotion about Abigail’s death.