Still Life - Karen Pirie Series 06 (2020)

by McDermid, Val

  She paused, weighing up the options.

  It would be good to see you. Kx

  Before she could have second thoughts, she sent it off into the ether then closed her email. Because the new sleeper trains had half-decent Wi-Fi, she headed for the BBC iPlayer site and found a Scandi crime drama she’d not seen before. She got ready for bed, inserted her earbuds – in spite of not understanding the language she wanted the sound effects and the music – and settled down to watch some Norwegian cop figure out an impenetrable serial killer cold case. Ten minutes in and she reckoned she’d have done a better job. Fifteen minutes in and she was spark out, lulled into strange dreams by the meaningless mumble in her ears.

  When Karen woke and checked her phone, she realised they were at Carstairs, where the long snake of the night train split in two, half heading for Glasgow and half for Edinburgh. The jolt of separation was what had wakened her. She stretched and yawned, pulling the earphones out as she did so. Deciding there was no point in trying to catch any more sleep, she rolled out of bed and headed for the cubicle that housed the toilet and the shower.

  By the time the train pulled into Glasgow, she was clean and refreshed, hair still damp but reasonably tidy. Her brain was working and she was making plans for the day. It was time to grab these cases by the throat and take control.

  Karen was gratified to find Jason already at his desk when she walked in shortly after nine. ‘Boss,’ he exclaimed, nearly knocking over a can of Irn-Bru in his surprise. ‘When did you get back? You never said …’

  ‘I just got off the sleeper. What’s with the Irn-Bru? Standards slipping?’ Now she looked at him more closely, she could see the dark smudges under his eyes and a pallor on his skin that turned his freckles into an orange star map.

  He sighed. ‘Busted. I had a few bevvies last night. One of Eilidh’s pals, it was her birthday, we all went out for a pizza, that new place down the bottom of Leith Walk, they do massive jugs of sangria and before you know it, your mouth’s stopped working.’

  Karen grinned. ‘As long as your brain’s still working. I’ll away and get us some coffee. Better arrange your thoughts and bring me up to speed.’

  When she handed over the coffee, Jason took a swallow and shuddered. ‘Bloody hell, boss, what’s in that?’

  ‘Two extra shots. I thought you needed a wee livener.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Livener? More like a heart attack in a cup.’

  While he worked on his drink, Karen scanned in the contents of the folder from James Auld’s bedroom and pinged it across to Daisy. Probably a pointless exercise, but maybe somebody on Charlie Todd’s MIT would understand something she hadn’t. ‘How did you get on with tracking down Amanda McAndrew? Or her alias?’ she asked.

  Jason couldn’t disguise his glumness. ‘Not a trace. I tried DVLA with both names. No vehicle registered to either of them since Amanda had the camper van. It was deregistered following the SORN declaration three years ago. But we know where it’s been for at least some of that time.’

  ‘I’d say pretty much all of that time. You wouldn’t take the risk of driving around in a van that would be picked up as illegal on traffic cams or by any patrol car that bothered to run the plates. Not with a dead body in the back. No, I think the van was already in Susan Leitch’s garage when the road tax ran out. So, we’re not going to find her that way. What about HMRC?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing. Neither of them is registered for VAT and neither of them has submitted a tax return for the past three years.’

  ‘And the website? How did you get on there?’

  ‘OK, so I went to the site and tried to order a pair of earrings. And the screen said, “Sorry, this item is currently out of stock. Please leave your email and we will message you when it becomes available.” Fair enough, I thought. So I had a crack at a nice wee pendant with a tiger’s eye stone in it.’ He referred to his notebook. ‘And this time, the screen said, “Sorry, we are having some difficulty in sourcing stones of sufficient quality to fulfil your order at this time. Please leave your email and we will message you when it becomes available.”’

  ‘Interesting,’ Karen said. ‘Did you try to order a specially commissioned piece?’

  ‘Sure did, boss.’ Again he checked his notes. ‘“Due to an unusually high number of recent orders, we are unable to accept fresh commissions at present. Please leave your email—”’

  ‘“And we will message you when it becomes available,”’ Karen finished.

  ‘It’s like they don’t want to sell you anything.’

  Karen tapped a pencil end to end on her notebook. ‘I think it’s that they don’t actually have anything to sell you. Because dead women don’t do silversmithing. It’s a smokescreen, Jason. If anybody goes looking for Dani, they’re going to find the site and if they try to make contact, they’ll get a message that looks like she’s doing pretty well. Did you manage to track the website host?’

  ‘It’s a one-man outfit in Birmingham. But that’s a dead end too. He doesn’t know where his clients are based. It’s totally anonymised, they pay him in bitcoin. You tell him what you want, he’ll set up your site, no questions asked.’

  Karen groaned. ‘Really? How do we let unregulated stuff like that go on? No wonder the bloody internet is such a sink of horror.’

  ‘The one thing you can say about this?’

  ‘Go on, I’m listening.’

  ‘All this? You don’t do this unless you’ve got something bad to hide. It’s like a confession on its own.’

  ‘That’s true, but it doesn’t help us get any closer to Amanda McAndrew.’

  ‘Maybe we should try to talk to her parents? They might be able to suggest—’

  ‘The parents.’ Karen interrupted him eagerly. ‘Do we know when they moved to Crete? Get their Facebook page up, Jason. Let’s see how far back it goes.’ She jumped up and walked round the desk, leaning over his shoulder as his fingers rattled over the keys. He scrolled down the page, clicking on various option.

  ‘I think it was 2015,’ he muttered. ‘Should we not contact them and see what they’ve got to say about their daughter?’

  Karen pulled a face. ‘It’s hard to make that sort of contact from a polis seem anything other than a big deal. And it’s not how you want to tell someone their daughter might be a murderer. For one thing, you’d want to see the whites of their eyes. For another, we don’t want them to alert Amanda to how much we know.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘There,’ she said, tapping the screen with her pencil. ‘It goes back nearly five years. Before Amanda and Dani hit the road.’ She returned to her seat. ‘They didn’t just buy a wee holiday home. They bought a business, a way of life. They’ve got no plans to come back here. They’ll have sold their cars. And who knew that better than their daughter? Jason, get back on to your DVLA contact. Check out whether there have been any vehicles registered to Barry or Anita McAndrew in the last three years. I can’t believe she’s in the wind without a motor.’

  28

  Friday, 21 February 2020

  If Karen had been hoping that Charlie Todd or one of his team would have some brilliant case-cracking inspiration when they were presented with the Parisian information, she’d have been in for a disappointment. But since she’d had no optimism on that score, she’d merely sighed, scooped up Daisy and headed for Mary Auld’s house.

  They were almost there when Charlie called. ‘Good news, Karen,’ he said.

  ‘You sound like a man who’s won the lottery.’

  ‘Well, five out of the six numbers anyway. We’ve had a call from a woman who lets out a cottage in Elie. She went in this morning to do the turnaround, but the renter’s stuff is still in the cottage. Clothes, laptop. And the fresh food in the fridge is either past the sell-by date or heading that way.’

  ‘You’re right, Charlie. We’re only ten, fifteen minutes away from Elie now, we might as well head over there before we talk to Mary Auld. Can you text me th
e address and get the owner to meet us there? And we’ll need a crime scene team to check the place over.’

  ‘Aye, OK.’ He couldn’t keep the disappointed note from his voice. Karen felt like the playground bully, stealing his sweets at playtime.

  ‘If your guys hadn’t been all over the holiday lets, we’d have struggled with this,’ she said, trying not to sound patronising.

  ‘Right enough, it’s all about teamwork,’ he said, brightening. ‘Good luck in Elie.’

  Bayview Cottage did what it said on the tin. It was a low-slung cottage painted coral pink, hunched on the shore where Elie merged into Earlsferry next door. They’d had to park on the main street and head down a narrow vennel that led them to the seafront where an easterly wind threatened to strip the top layer from their skin. The sea was battleship grey, flecked with slashes of white foam. ‘This is how we have such great skin in Fife,’ Karen observed, tears springing to her eyes. ‘We get exfoliated on a daily basis.’

  The cottage was well maintained, front door and window frames painted pale grey. Karen barely raised her hand to ring the bell when the door opened. ‘Are you from the police?’ The woman on the doorstep set Karen’s teeth on edge. It wasn’t so much the cut-glass English accent as the look that swept over her from head to toe and dismissed her as insufficient. At first glance, she looked in her early thirties, blonde hair arranged in a loose chignon. She was dressed in thigh-hugging jeans tucked into leather riding boots, her upper half swathed in the sort of designer knitwear that Karen knew would turn her into a walking ball of wool. It was only when they drew closer that Karen realised she was nearer fifty than thirty.

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector Pirie,’ she said. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Mortimer. And you are?’

  ‘Do you people not communicate with each other? I’m Mrs Archibald. Livy Archibald. This is my cottage. You’d better come in.’ She stepped back and waved them inside. It was comfortably furnished in a clean but somehow lived-in style. The decor was predictable for a coastal cottage – framed prints with a nautical theme, pottery decorated with stylised fish and bits of boat. A trio of glass net floats sat in the hearth. But there was no sign of a laptop. ‘I don’t normally do the changeover,’ she said. ‘But the girl let me down. Some nonsense about having the flu.’ She tutted. ‘Honestly. As if I’ve nothing better to do. And now this.’

  ‘Does this sort of thing happen often? People not checking out on time?’ Karen roamed the room, looking for signs of occupation and finding none.

  ‘Occasionally they’re a couple of hours late. But this guy should have cleared out yesterday. I only got to it this morning because I was busy then.’

  ‘And you called us, why?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Because your people sent an email to all the listed owners of holiday lets asking if we’d let a property to anyone called Allard or Auld. I didn’t get round to checking my records until I turned up this morning and found all his stuff in the kitchen and the bedroom.’

  ‘Busy, were you?’ Karen’s tone was mild but her eyebrows were raised.

  ‘Yes, as it happens. Now, are you going to clear this man’s stuff out of my cottage so I can get on with running my business?’

  ‘It’s not quite that straightforward, Mrs Archibald. This is a murder inquiry and this is potentially a crime scene.’

  ‘A crime scene?’ Her voice rose. ‘Look around you. Nothing’s been disturbed. Is this the guy they fished out of the sea off St Monans? How on earth is this a crime scene?’

  ‘There may be evidence of a third party having been here with Mr Auld—’

  ‘Allard. It was booked under Allard. You don’t even know the name of the person you’re interested in. And I’ve got another couple booked in here, arriving this afternoon. What am I supposed to do with them? I’m trying to run a business here.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Archibald. Our crime scene technicians will be as quick as possible, but until they’re done, nobody else comes in here. And we’re going to need your fingerprints and DNA for elimination purposes.’

  Daisy was standing behind the landlady and Karen caught her eye. ‘When did Mr Allard book the cottage?’ Daisy asked, picking up the hint.

  ‘I’ll have to check my records.’

  ‘Perhaps we could go and do that now? Do you live nearby?’

  Livy Archibald pursed her lips and frowned. ‘Just up the road in Kilconquhar. This is all incredibly inconvenient.’

  ‘I could follow you back there and get the details.’ Daisy produced her best smile.

  ‘It would save you hanging around here,’ Karen said.

  Grudgingly, the woman agreed. She handed Karen the cottage keys and followed Daisy out, grumbling every step of the way. Karen snapped on a pair of nitrile gloves and headed straight across the hall to the bedroom. It was dominated by an unmade king-sized bed. Judging by the single dent in the pillows, only one person had occupied it. A holdall sat on the window seat. Karen rounded the bed and looked inside. A pair of black trousers, winter weight, a French label she didn’t recognise. Four pairs of underpants, three pairs of socks. Two T-shirts and a lightweight crew-necked sweater. A pair of slip-on black leather loafers. One paperback novel in French by Bernard Minier. Not so much as a notebook. As she turned away, she caught sight of the edge of a laptop sitting on the shelf below the bedside table.

  ‘Bingo,’ she said, reaching for it. She opened the MacAir. ‘And of course it needs a bloody password.’ She checked her notebook for Auld’s date of birth and tried various combinations coupled with both of his names. No joy. She flicked through the pages until she found her notes on Auld’s career in the Foreign Legion. His service number got her nowhere, not with names or dates of birth. ‘Fuck,’ she muttered, closing the lid. This was one for Tamsin over at Gartcosh. And who knew how long that would take?

  The bathroom yielded little. A plastic spongebag, generic supermarket hair and body wash, deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste and an electric razor. James Auld travelled about as light as a man could get. The laptop was the only possible source of clues to what he was doing here, beyond visiting Mary Auld.

  The kitchen was no more informative. A plate, a water glass and a mug sat on the dish drainer alongside a fork, a knife and a spoon. The dishwasher was empty. A loaf with a few slices off one end sat on the breadboard, hard as a brick. The fridge contained a tub of butter, a half-eaten Scottish camembert, two ready meals from the local farm shop, half a carton of milk and most of a packet of ground coffee. Karen thought it didn’t look like the provisions of a man having a wee holiday in the East Neuk. These were the basic rations of a man on a mission.

  Back in the living room, she stared out of the window at the wintry Forth. East Lothian was a mere blur on the far side. The view was about as clear as her take on the case, Karen thought. Nothing was going her way, and the spectre of the Dog Biscuit was hanging over her. She’d demanded a swift clean resolution to this case and that was the one thing that was completely out of reach right now.

  Karen was saved from descending into gloom by the arrival of the CSI team. She brought the crime scene manager up to speed. ‘There’s no sign of a struggle, no indication that there was anybody else here other than our victim. But I want to be sure of that. There’s a laptop in the bedroom. That needs to go to Gartcosh as a matter of urgency, marked for the attention of Tamsin Martinu.’

  The CSM looked bored. He’d heard it all before, but he’d worked with Karen way back when she was still Fife Police’s cold case boss and she knew he wouldn’t cut corners. She stepped outside to let them get on with their work and turned into the vennel out of the wind. She texted Daisy to come and pick her up as soon as she was finished with the landlady and walked to the nearest pub to wait and brood. It was the part of the job she enjoyed least.

  Karen had warmed to Mary Auld two years before. There was something dignified about her, something humane too. But that didn’t mean she got a free pass when it came to either her husband�
��s disappearance or her brother-in-law’s putative murder. As soon as they walked into the living room, Karen’s eyes were drawn not to the dramatic view but to the paintings. They’d been on the walls in the Edinburgh flat, she remembered. But the light here meant they created much more impact. She knew next to nothing about art, but even she could see that Mary Auld’s walls exhibited a coherence of taste.

  ‘That’s quite a collection,’ she said, pausing to admire them.

  ‘Iain and I had similar taste in the visual arts,’ Mary said. ‘We liked a certain style of painting that was typical of the mid-twentieth century. We kept an eye on local auctions and sometimes we got lucky. They’re not very valuable, but we chose them because we liked them. I find it comforting to have them around me still. Are you interested in art, DCI Pirie?’

  Karen looked rueful. ‘I’m embarrassed to admit I’m one of those people who say, “I don’t know much about art but I know what I like.”’ She wasn’t about to explain that what scant knowledge she possessed had come via the expert curators at the National Galleries, thanks to previous investigations into cold case thefts.

  ‘I think liking is the only reason to buy art,’ Mary said, steering them to the chairs that looked out at the sea. ‘Have you taken over the investigation from DCI Todd?’

  ‘We’re working together. Because of my review into your husband’s disappearance. There’s a possibility the two cases are connected.’

  Mary Auld gave a weary smile. ‘I can see why you might think so. Two apparently inexplicable events in the same family invites a desire to link them. But I don’t see how there can be any connection, not after all this time.’ She fiddled with the wedding ring she still wore, turning it round and round. ‘But of course I’ll help you in any way I can.’

  The one thing Karen had paused to do in Edinburgh was to scan the photograph of Iain Auld and the mystery man. She’d cropped the civil servant out of the picture, leaving the other man in profile. Now she took the print from her bag and passed it to Mary. ‘Do you know who this man is?’