by Caro Ramsay
‘Yes. I can’t tell you how bad it has been.’
Then the expression changed slightly as the receptionist recalled the newspaper reports about the alcoholic sister, Valerie, the one who tried to buy a murdered woman’s baby.
‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ The receptionist waved her hands vaguely over her desk to a door marked ‘offices’. ‘You have a wee sit down in there and I’ll tell her you are here, she’s on the phone right now.’
Five minutes later the door opened and Irene Marshall came in, carrying two cups of hot tea. Valerie felt her stomach tighten. She needed a vodka, ProPlus and caffeine. She had a small bottle in her bag, next to the gun still wrapped in a hotel towel. The drink was talking to her, whistling at her for her attention. She pushed the temptation away, she had to try to stay focussed on this. Abigail might have said something. It’s impossible to work alongside somebody and not get an idea of their lives no matter how much remained unsaid.
Did she allude to him being abusive? Were they in financial trouble?
‘Hi, so sorry to keep you waiting.’ Irene smiled an empathetic smile and handed Val the tea. ‘How are you keeping? I saw you at the funeral, but well … not the time or the place.’ She sat down on the free office chair and she wheeled it towards the table, a ridiculous scurrying motion like a child in primary one. That left Valerie standing where the patients waited. She wasn’t being invited into the inner sanctum. She was being politely tolerated. How much had Abigail said about her troubled sister? It had all been in the papers anyway.
‘How are you doing?’ she said, accompanied by a professional, distant smile.
‘I’m fine.’
The next question would be, have the police got any further forward with their enquiries. She was close.
‘Have they found anything yet? Do they know who did it?’ She leaned forward, trying to engage.
Valerie sat down, feeling five years old and somebody was trying to explain to her about the birds and the bees. ‘They won’t tell me anything, they say that I am too close. It’s about George,’ said Valerie, the name came out hard, like a ricochet off a cliff face. It stung the silence between them.
‘George?’ Irene was confused. A phone rang in the distance. They heard the receptionist answer it, a quiet muffled conversation.
‘The police never asked us about George. They asked about patients that might have mental health issues, anybody who might have wished her harm.’ Irene shook her head. ‘But she was doing so few hours, she was really only seeing her own list of patients. Working alongside us, but not part of the team. Which was her choice.’
‘Why was that, do you think? Why was she only working those few hours? Was she not happy here?’ Valerie looked at her own fingers tapping at the side of the doctor’s desk, the skin red and flaking, her nails bitten to the stumps.
Irene Marshall was looking as well, making up her own diagnosis. ‘Oh yes, but she wanted to be at home.’
‘And that was why she cut her hours down?’
‘Yes, Valerie.’ Irene had a terrible condescension in her voice. ‘She really wanted to be at home, be a housewife. After Oscar died, she threw herself into her work but she wasn’t really cut out for it. She wanted a home, and to be at home, and when she married George she took her chance. I don’t blame her. This job can be incredibly stressful.’
‘But she loved her patients.’
‘She did, she did. But the job isn’t what it was. Cuts, patients knowing all their rights and none of their responsibilities. It’s a highly stressful job, we were glad when she cut her hours, it saved us money. And when your sister got stressed, she wasn’t the easiest person to work with.’
‘No?’
Irene shook her head. ‘I am only trying to help you, Valerie. Your sister could be a little overbearing at times, and I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but she was a different person after Oscar died.’
‘After Oscar died or after she married George?’
‘One and the same.’ Irene avoided the question.
‘How is George coping? I’ve only seen him a few times since it all.’ Irene raised an eyebrow, questioning. Was this not in keeping with her happy family internal monologue? Or the photo that had been in the papers.
‘At first I was in hospital.’ Valerie’s fingers went up to the soft wool of the cowl neck of her jumper. ‘He was grieving. He comes from Wester Ross, Port MacDuff, so he has been up there mostly. There is nothing down here to keep him.’
‘Abigail always spoke as if you were a close family.’
Could she sense a note of sarcasm there? Or was she being oversensitive? ‘We are.’
Were. Past tense.
Irene moved to get up, the chat was over.
‘Did the police ask anything about Abigail, anything personal?’
Irene gave her a sidelong glance. ‘That would be a confidential conversation.’
‘I’m desperate, they tell me nothing. She was my sister.’
Irene sighed. ‘The police were asking me if Abigail was having an affair but the answer to that is no.’ She nodded as if that was the end of it, looking right at Valerie as if she could hear the internal monologue of every justification for every drink she had ever had.
‘Did they also ask if Abigail thought George was having an affair?’
‘They did, and Abigail did think that George had been unfaithful to her. She had said that to me. She thought she was being betrayed, lied to.’
Valerie took a deep breath, the waft of Ralph Lauren aftershave coming back to her, familiar and sweet, a brush on the cheek. ‘Really? Did she ever tell you who it was he was seeing?’
Irene nodded. ‘I’m surprised you had to ask. It was you.’
Anderson was having a good think about what Patrick had said. Not a man to waste words, his obsession, her obsession. Morna’s, what had he said, ‘clumsiness’? A car crash and two nasty falls? Not so much a light bulb moment as a blind man doing a jigsaw with no picture to go on. And no corners to start with. Whatever injuries Morna was sustaining, her boss did not think they were due to clumsiness.
Bannon, though, had been very approachable in a ‘if Mathieson asks me I’ll deny I ever said it’ kind of way.
Anderson had seen the brief phone call as a trade-off. ‘I’ll tell you what I know of Costello as a human being, and you tell me what you know about Haggerty.’ Bannon had been quick to jump on that, repeated the alibi. ‘He’s innocent, yes. I don’t want to know that, I want to know what he does for a living.’
‘Something unintelligible with numbers. Project management with accounts. He’s contracted all over the place.’
‘Does he have a degree?’
‘Yes, business and accounts, computing or something.’
‘What university?’
‘Is this relevant?’
‘Which one?’
‘Errr, Strathclyde, I think.’ He heard the tap tap on a keyboard.
That made sense. Glasgow was academic but Strathclyde was known for its business school.
‘No, I tell a lie.’ Anderson could hear Bannon typing. The movement of a mouse being lifted up and put back down again. ‘He was at Glasgow.’
‘Do you know when?’ Anderson was doing a quick calculation of Haggerty’s age.
‘Nope, they would know though. Why?’
‘I’ll tell you when I’m sure of something. And you can tell Mathieson that you worked it all out for yourself if it becomes pertinent to the current investigation. How old is Haggerty?’
‘Born 7th June 1972.’
‘Forty-five. OK thanks.’
Now that wasn’t a something, but it also wasn’t a nothing. He had a little further down the investigative road to go. Had George Haggerty been at uni at the same time as Sally Logan? The same time as he himself had? So were thousands of other people. Especially as Sally lost that year when she hurt her knee. She was around the uni for five years not four … that made an overlap more likely. But how ma
ny men are on the outskirts of two rapes?
Himself? Braithwaite? Haggerty?
How much commonality was there really?
As he himself said, it’s not a big ocean when the fish swim in the same small circles.
By eleven a.m., Anderson was on his third coffee and had filled three sides of an A4 pad with frenetic scribbling. Despite the serious subject matter, he was totally absorbed in his work this morning, to the extent he was even enjoying it.
Morna was conscientious and methodical, not one to leave any stone unturned. He had logged in to the system to view her access record to the files. She had been off early in the year after suffering injuries after a road traffic incident. Before that she had suffered a head injury after a bad fall. Another fall had left her unconscious for two hours. So she was a good detective with little spacial awareness, guessed Anderson. Apparently it was an ongoing joke in her station although he didn’t see Patrick as a comedian. That comment was barbed. Was she a victim of abuse?
It seemed as though Morna had been looking at these cases for four or five years. Before then she seemed to have been on a career break, he checked with HR. That would have been to have her son, Finn. Then she seemed to have gone back to work and started looking up cold case rapes, searching the Police Scotland combined database for anything that might match. But match what?
The top of her list of matches? The cold cases he was working on were Sally Logan and Gillian Witherspoon, but the occupant of her number spot was an unknown name to him but one Patrick had mentioned.
Sharon Sixsmith.
There was no indication that she had been raped, only that she had been found dead after falling down a crag near Tornapress. Then he saw it: a badly injured left shoulder. So what? He could imagine falling down between two sheer rock faces, you were bound to hit a few bones, injure a few joints on the way.
But it was the damage to the left glenohumeral joint Morna had focussed in on, judging by the fact that it was the only similarity. Then he thought, Sally had been out hillwalking early morning on her own. This girl had been found, at the bottom of a crag, her VW camper van … Anderson’s heart gave an exited little extra beat and he told himself to calm down. Retro VW camper vans were a lifestyle choice. It told you about the person as a consumer, not about them as a victim. He looked back up. Sharon Sixsmith, twenty-two. The photograph showed a slim, dark-haired girl, she looked very fit, very bright, she didn’t look the sort that would get into trouble easily. Her eyes glowed with quiet confidence, she looked very capable. He scrolled around, found the notes on the camper. It looked as though she had been abducted from it, but it had taken three months to find the body. Three months? The criminal connection was not made until afterwards. At the time, she was just another missing hillwalker. And it would have been too late for a rape kit.
The boys had a map of Scotland up at the far end of the office, but Googling was easier, especially as the deposition site had been so remote. There was no name, just a map reference and that was too sparsely populated for Google to show him anything more than a screen of bright green. The satellite image looked like the face of an evil giant, a black gash for a smile, wicked in its contortions. The theory was that she had gone for a walk and got lost, or had been abducted from her VW with no sign of a struggle, or got drunk and was driven away. And she ended up falling down a crag; the investigation at the time went nowhere. A few local troublemakers had been brought in but easily dismissed. This was in April of 1987. Sally had been raped in 1992.
The second on her list was Nicola Barnes. Another rape, although she was still alive. Her car had started to make an odd noise. She had stopped, a good Samaritan had stopped. Anderson’s stomach flipped at the name.
George Haggerty.
Anderson let out a long slow breath.
He’d had a quick look at the car then said he’d call a garage. There was no mobile signal, such as the range was in those days. He had driven away and called the garage once he was in range. He had been charming with his lovely smile and big brown eyes. It was while she had been waiting that Nicola had been attacked from the back. Her left shoulder dislocated. No forensics. She had been gagged and blindfolded but had said two things of interest. Her attacker had been wearing something like a boiler suit, and there was a noise that distracted her. Like a slapping sound.
A clapping sound?
George had an alibi, drinking cappuccino in a coffee house where he had told the waitress about the girl he had left with her broken down car.
Another perfect alibi, for him.
Anderson was impressed with Morna.
The third one the electronic intelligence path took him to was much older. This case was a woman called Jennifer Argyll who had vanished into thin air in 1987 on the coast near Port MacDuff. So that was what had sparked Morna’s interest, she would have grown up with the case. Anderson knew how these cases became legends in the local stations, everybody would have an opinion. That was as far as Anderson got as Jennifer’s file had been transferred to cold case, which he couldn’t easily access. But Anderson knew Morna could pluck those connections from thin air just as easily as Jennifer had disappeared into it.
Anderson picked up the phone to call Mitchum, he wanted a meeting to tell him he was going up north. He wanted Morna to book him a room in the Exciseman. There was the added bonus that he couldn’t hear Moses crying from up there.
TEN
Erin and Rachel had left Lomondside campsite after a hearty breakfast, cooked outdoors on a single burner Calor gas stove, starting with a knob of butter melting and finishing with the full English swirling in a golden gravy of animal fat and rainwater. It tasted delicious. Then they packed up the tent and repacked their day rucksacks, leaving the bigger rucksacks to be picked up by HikeLite and taken up to the next stop at Bridge Of Orchy.
It was a three-hour walk, to be completed that morning. They hadn’t made good progress, the rain and wind had been in their faces every single step of the way.
At half eleven, there was a brief cessation in the onslaught of rain, so they decided to rest before they reached Tyndrum. They were walking cold and tight-legged. The stony path underfoot was puddle after puddle, their waterproof boots had held out for the first thirty miles of the West Highland Way and had then become absorbent. Now it was a question of keeping the water swilling around their feet warm, and keeping out the ice-cold water that lay in wait in the deeper puddles. They walked in silence, the two of them in single file. Changing every so often with one in the lead being battered by the elements, the other sheltering behind. The rain seemed to be changing direction exactly as the path changed, so it was always hitting them in the face. The weather and the conditions underfoot were challenging as the guidebook said it often was when doing winter walking on the west coast. This wasn’t pleasant hiking, this was a trial of endurance and character. The beautiful, stunning scenery was clouded, often they were walking through the clouds themselves. And it wasn’t quiet, always the splish thud of their boots on the path, the pitter-patter of rain and the squeak of their waterproofs against each other.
They were walking up to Tyndrum to the ‘By The Way’ hostel, a hot shower and a cooked meal that was devoid of rainwater. They could dry off their socks, get a rest and, hopefully, a good night’s sleep that wouldn’t be interrupted by the wind clawing and baying at the door of the tent and the constant irregular flap-flap of battered canvas.
They walked past the River Fillan, flowing high and angry, its grey waters tumbling and rushed. Two gold panners, covered in waders that reached to their armpits, and gloves that melted into a hat showing not one single flash of skin, stood on the calmer parts of the river, ever hopeful of finding a tiny nugget of a darkly glistening stone.
They turned away from the path to the river, heading north towards the hostel. They would be there in half an hour, maybe a little less if the path started to decline, a little more if the wind blew up again. They knew from the map that the lochan was ahe
ad of them and they both wanted to see it. They had hoped the rain would clear, so they could get some photographs taken. They had been discussing it in the pub last night, warm and cosy, and more than a little drunk, looking at the map and trying to get a signal on their mobiles. As was usual in these parts, the barman proved better than Google and was happy to supply the two students of English Literature with the colourful history of the area, despite the fact that he was from the Ukraine. He told the story of Robert the Bruce throwing his sword into the lochan, a fine claymore it had been, about five-feet long and it ‘weighed a ton’. The king was being pursued at the time by a couple of armed horseman, probably English, but the details were sketchy. After a few more drams, the defenceless king single-handedly brought down the entire English army before legging it.
They were going to ask if the sword in the lochan was protected by a lady of the lake but they thought the locals might not find that funny and kept their counsel.
Sure enough at the side of the footpath, they came across the stone, a large rectangular rock with the outline of a sword carved into it. ‘They used to swing a claymore around their heads you know,’ the barman had said, ‘hacking bits off anything or anybody too close.’
The lochan nestled in the hills, mist drifting right and left, low on the dark, black surface of the loch. There didn’t seem to be any clear border between land and water, no clear line at all, greens and reds and blues, muted black and browns all melting into each other. They stood, looking in silence, catching their breath, before both of them shrugged off their rucksacks, a signal that they were going to rest a while, at least the stone gave them something to sit on.
In silence they sat, the two of them, staring out over the water. Being mesmerized by the mist drifting from left to right, right to left, slowly revealing something on the far bank. Something with legs that floated out in the black water, something with arms up on the grassy bank, somebody with fingers grasping, as if he had reached out and nearly, very nearly, made it.
Anderson closed his eyes and cursed inwardly, his exhilaration of the early morning evaporated in an instant.