Burning Greed

by Diane M Dickson

  Chapter 18

  The report was as Tanya had expected and the cold, precise delivery gave no indication of the reality of what it must have been like for the two detectives observing the examination. She felt sorry for Dan and Paul when she read the description of the burned and fragile skin, the body fat melted away, the eyes – boiled, burned, burst. It must have been grim in the morgue. The heat had been insufficient to carbonize the bones, and though this was a blessing for them in the gathering of evidence, it was a relief to know for certain that the woman had been dead when the flames had engulfed her. This was confirmed by the lack of any inhalation of smoke or burning of the inside of the throat and lungs.

  She highlighted parts of the document, and copied and pasted others into her own notes. It was a portrayal of the deceased, cobbled together from sad remains. The woman’s height and her estimated age, the fact that she was probably a little undernourished. Simon Hewitt had sent away tissue and blood samples to be tested for drug abuse. No tattoos or scars on the unburned parts of the body, no chance of fingerprints. Nothing much to help them, unless the DNA results brought a miracle. She knew better than to hope for too much. They were reaching out to dentists but the teeth had a few old fillings and nothing that looked recent.

  Tanya wrote an email to Charlie. She thanked him, told him that things in Scotland were tricky and left it at that.

  Above her were raised voices, the slam of doors and when someone thundered down the stairs she walked to the kitchen door. Fiona was dressed for outside, a padded gilet over her sweater.

  “Are you going out?” Tanya asked.

  Fiona spat the words at her sister, “Yes, I’m going out. I’m going out to look for your niece. You don’t seem to have fully grasped this, Detective Inspector Miller,” there was anger and pain behind the words, “but my little girl is missing, and someone has to find her.”

  Tanya drew in a breath. “Where are you going to go?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve looked everywhere already. Several times, you’ve been around and around the area, gone to her friends, her college, her usual haunts. You haven’t found her. You won’t find her, not wandering about without a plan.”

  She waited, watched Fiona’s face crumple and her shoulders slump and then she moved across the small distance between them and wrapped her arms around her sister and held her close while she sobbed and sniffed. Fiona eventually lifted her head and from somewhere deep inside she dredged up a watery smile.

  “What should I do then?” she asked.

  “You should come in here with me, and we should go over everything and then we should go up to her room and turn it inside out because somewhere there is the explanation for all of this.”

  “And your dead woman, the other case?” Fiona pointed to the laptop, still open on the kitchen table.

  “I’ve told you, I can handle this. Charlie is brilliant and, with his help, I can do that, and this. Have some faith in me, Fiona, I’ve got this. I know how to do my job. All my jobs.”

  Chapter 19

  It took most of the morning to turn out cupboards and drawers. Fiona insisted that she had already looked everywhere. Tanya nodded and carried on. She conducted the search the way that she had learned. This way had, in the past, unearthed hidden letters, secreted diaries and even in one case a laptop that the parents of a fourteen-year-old boy didn’t know existed. Serena’s violin was in its padded backpack propped against the wall. Fiona picked it up and fiddled with the zip.

  “I hadn’t realised that some days I just don’t even come into her room. She was supposed to have a music lesson after school. I should have noticed that she hadn’t taken this. If I had done, then maybe this would never have happened. Or at least I might have called her, taken it to her or something and then I would have known. I would, wouldn’t I?”

  She paused and sighed. “It all seemed so good, you know? All so well organised and peaceful. I don’t understand where I’ve gone wrong.”

  She sat for a while longer with the instrument case on her lap, gazing out of the window at the big back garden. Tanya could think of nothing to say that would help, so she carried on, turning out drawers, examining the undersides of cabinets and pulling up the edges of the carpet.

  By lunchtime, it seemed likely that they had exhausted every avenue and she called a break.

  “I just need a few minutes to talk to Charlie,” Tanya told Fiona. She waited for an outburst, but none came. Her sister seemed to have accepted the working arrangement. Graham had said that he was going out to walk the streets. Tanya hadn’t commented, it wasn’t her business unless his secrets had something to do with Serena, and for now that wasn’t clear.

  * * *

  Charlie had been to see Alan Parker. “Odd bloke to be honest,” he told Tanya, “definitely punching above his weight with that wife.”

  “Was he any help?”

  “Not really. He was away, wasn’t he? Said that he had no idea who could have been in the warehouse, nobody should have been. He thought it was all secure. The two cars that were in there were on order for a couple of clients in Australia and to be honest, he seemed more upset about those than he did about the fact that somebody had died in his property.”

  “You didn’t like him, did you?”

  “Is it that obvious? No, I didn’t. There was something about him that was just a bit off. But then again, in real terms he is just a used car salesman, isn’t he?”

  “Bit of a cliché there, Charlie.” Tanya laughed.

  “Yes, I suppose so. But he wasn’t the sort of bloke you could take to, if you know what I mean. He didn’t seem particularly concerned about the woman. He didn’t ask any questions about her; couldn’t suggest who she might have been. I had the impression he was more worried about the insurance cover. He asked a few times about a crime number and how soon he could have access. I guess the cars were worth a small fortune and that’s possibly lost now. Anyway, the paperwork for the cars should be in the office, whenever we can get in there.

  “I was surprised that he didn’t have any electronic records, but he said he prefers hard copies. The fire officer reckons the place will be safe for workmen to get into later today and then they should be able to fix some sort of temporary access to the mezzanine. Not sure how safe it’s going to be until someone does a survey. Don’t see how much it’s going to tell us though. I don’t know if they are important, but we need to look.”

  He was quiet for a minute and in the background there was the hum of voices. The sound made Tanya long for her office and the incident room.

  “Some good news though. There is someone on the CCTV.”

  “Is it the bloke who raised the alarm? Have you spoken to him yet?”

  “Dan and Paul have. Not much there I don’t think. He was on his way home from the pub and saw the smoke. He called it in; that was it. He hung around until the brigade turned up and then he was ushered away with everyone else. Old bloke; fairly matter of fact about it all. Anyway, there is this other man. Not a bad image and we’ve got a print-out doing the rounds of the clubs and bars.”

  “Great stuff, Charlie. I’ll wait to hear back about that. It feels like a step forward at least.”

  “I’m sending you a recording of the Parker interview. I couldn’t get visual, not in his own house, but you can listen. Any movement up there?”

  “Not much. I’m going later today to speak to a Detective Laird and will probably ask about a television appeal. Maybe if Serena is staying somewhere with a boy or something like that and she sees the state her mum is in, she might get in touch. We can hope anyway. Thanks, Charlie. I’ll ring you later.”

  She rang off and filled in her notes. Her spirits lifted a little, there had been a few tiny steps forward. She desperately wanted to be there. Things sometimes broke suddenly and if that happened she needed to be a part of it, properly not just virtually. She thought they’d got everything covered but at one removed she worried something run of t
he mill might be missed.

  Chapter 20

  It had to be done. So, while the house was quiet, Tanya sat on the end of the bed and made a call to the bank. Late the night before, before she could give in to sleep, and because everything was already such a mess, she didn’t see how it could possibly get any worse so she had logged onto the website. She had been wrong; it got worse. There was no mistake by the bank, there were no problems with her cards except that they were maxed out. She had done some quick calculations and the stark truth was, even after payday, once her bills were settled, she would immediately slide back into the red.

  The advisor who answered the phone sounded impossibly young. His tone was polite but cold. Together they went through her options and before she rang off she had arranged an overdraft. She tried to convince him that charging her for every day she had been overdrawn was only making the situation worse, that it was nonsensical, but he wouldn’t be moved.

  She finished the call and threw the phone across the bed. She was angry mostly with herself. Even after her salary was deposited, she would have to cut back on her spending and monitor her outgoings. She had never had an overdraft before, but with her plastic strained to breaking point, there was no choice and having to keep a check on her spending was depressing.

  Her parents had struggled for as long as she could remember –going without to make sure that Fiona had all she needed. She had been their great white hope, the one thing that they could be proud of, but they had all suffered for it, Tanya most of all. Determined that she would have a good, well-paid job, she’d put everything into it, climbing the ranks and intending to go as high as possible. A good salary now and a decent pension guaranteed. Now here she was: in debt and worse off than Mum and Dad had ever been. They always paid their rent on time and the electric and gas had been through a coin meter, no chance of a bill they couldn’t cover. They would have never borrowed money, never gone into the red with the bank. Tears of fury and disappointment pricked at the back of her eyes. This was self-inflicted. Constant online shopping and lack of discipline had brought her to this. She was disgusted with herself.

  The front door slammed, and Graham’s voice drifted up from the hallway. She stood up and smoothed down her sweater. She’d fix it, cut back for a couple of months and it would be fine. In the meantime, there were more important things to think about.

  As she passed the door to Serena’s pretty bedroom she stepped inside. Everything was just what one would expect. Fairy lights wound into the headboard; band pictures and selfies with friends printed out and pinned to the walls. On the desk in front of the window there was nothing, just a slight difference in the colour of the wood where the laptop should have been. The violin case was still at the bottom of the bed where Fiona had sat cradling it.

  Tanya knew little about music. She listened sometimes in the car, but it wasn’t a big thing in her life. She knew even less about violins. She unzipped the case and stroked a finger across the shining surface. The interior of the backpack was a moulded form with the violin itself fitting snugly inside. Tanya curled her fingers around the neck and tried to lift it out. She hadn’t loosened the small padded flap that held the thing in place and as she tugged she felt the inside cradle move and shift, detaching from the cover. She jerked her hand away. She had no idea how much these things cost, but for sure it didn’t look cheap, and she didn’t think it was supposed to come apart like this. She pushed at the moulded polystyrene. It wouldn’t settle back neatly into the case, she pressed around the edges with her fingertips, but it was twisted, standing proud. She would have to take it out fully and reinsert it. She heard the soft thud of feet on the stairs. This was going to be embarrassing. With a glance behind, she moved to stand between the half-open door and the bed. She tugged at the insert again and it lifted out quite readily. Underneath, partly wedged against the side, was a small white envelope. She picked it up between her thumb and forefinger. A quick shiver of excitement ran down her spine. As Fiona stepped into the room Tanya held the envelope in front of her.

  “I think I may have found something,” she said.

  * * *

  The envelope was in one small evidence bag and the small pile of white pills was in another. Tanya, Fiona, and Graham sat around the kitchen table with the plastic bags between them. Fiona reached out with one finger and pushed the packet of pills towards her sister.

  “Do you know for certain, though?” she asked. “They could be something else, couldn’t they?”

  “No, I don’t know for certain,” Tanya said. “All I can tell you is that I have seen these before, they are quite distinctive with the butterfly logo on them. We seized some a while ago at a club – they came from The Netherlands. But until the lab has been able to examine them, we won’t know for certain. I believe that they are Ecstasy though. Look at it logically, if they were aspirin, which they patently are not, then they would hardly be hidden in the bottom of a violin case, would they?”

  “Maybe they got in there by accident. Perhaps they slid in…”

  Tanya didn’t bother to answer, they all knew that it was nonsense – the pills had been deliberately hidden.

  Graham spoke quietly, “So what do we do next? How will this help us to find her? Do we have to tell the police?”

  “Well, yes of course we have to tell them,” Tanya said. “You know that. But I’ll do it. I have my meeting in about an hour with Detective Laird. How it will help… well, I don’t know. The envelope looks ordinary, we’ll fingerprint it of course but I can’t imagine it’ll tell us much. We might be able to trace the origin of the pills but, again, that won’t tell us exactly how Serena got them, or more to the point what, if anything, it has to do with her running away. I need to speak to her mates, and her sisters.”

  “She wasn’t taking drugs.” Fiona shook her head. “She wasn’t. I would have known, and she just isn’t the type.”

  Tanya had heard it all before.

  Chapter 21

  Stan Laird was friendly. A fit looking man in his early fifties, serving in the Scottish force since he had left school, he would have seen just about everything there was to see in the world of crime. Tanya had worried that there might be some resentment at what could be seen as interference, but he smiled, shook her hand, offered her coffee and seemed to genuinely understand and sympathise with her situation. It made it so much easier to take out the evidence bags and place them on his cluttered desk.

  “Ah.” He shook his head. “Where were they? Is it certain they were Serena’s?”

  “There can’t be much doubt, I don’t think. They were in her bedroom, hidden. Of course, my sister and her husband are in denial right now, but…”

  The Scottish detective picked up the pills and envelope and handed them on to a constable for delivery to the lab. “Georgie, tell them, quick as possible will you. We’ve a lassie missing. Anything at all they can tell us, yes?” He turned back to Tanya. “You’ll know of course that it probably won’t help us to find her. It points us in the direction of the folk she might have been mixing with though. We should probably take this up a notch or two, under the circumstances. We shouldn’t have missed this anyway, I’ll be having a word with my lads.”

  He looked angry and concerned as he jotted a couple of notes on the pad in front of him. Tanya didn’t envy ‘his lads’.

  “In fairness they were well hidden. I only found them by chance really. Anyway, look, I’m going to speak to her best friend later today, just casually at her home to start with. I thought maybe if I’m more of a ‘worried auntie’ than a cop she might be more open with me. I know you’ve talked to her already and she had nothing to tell you, but that was before this development. Is that okay? Do you want to come?”

  “No, that’s fine. Better if you go yourself, I think. Get back to me as soon as you can. Fill me in, will you? The more information we have the quicker we might be able to bring this wee girl home where she should be. But then you know that; I don’t need to be tell
ing you your job now, do I? I read about the angels case. That was impressive.”

  Tanya shook her head. “We were lucky in the end, to be honest, and we did have two women dead.”

  “Aye, but a fair outcome in the end.”

  “Yes, it was.” She smiled.

  They went through the investigation as much as it was. A deliberate runaway was what they had decided at first, nothing more. The quantity of drugs was so small that they agreed it might be incidental, but it did shed doubt on the image Serena’s parents had painted of their ‘good’ girl. They talked about a television appeal but given the discovery of the pills, decided to hold off.

  “I’m not sure how much good it would do,” Tanya said. “My sister, well she wouldn’t want to let her guard down in public, and a bit of emotion from the relatives usually plays best, don’t you think?” It was a cold, hard assessment, but honest.

  She drove away from the station in Fiona’s car, back towards the detached houses, spacious gardens, and hidden truths.

  Estella McKenzie, Serena’s best friend, lived around the corner from Fiona and Graham’s home. She was pretty in the way of teenaged girls from affluent families: hair shining, skin clear and her developing figure athletic and healthy. She was not quite five feet tall, hazel eyed and red haired; freckles covered her face and arms, and someone more Scottish in appearance would be hard to imagine. Estella’s mother, Ruth, wondered if she should stay and Tanya assured her it was just a chat, nothing official. She hoped that this wouldn’t come back to bite her later, the girl should have a responsible adult with her, but the things that Tanya wanted to talk about would be more likely to be hidden with Mum in the room.

  They sat in a bright conservatory; a smooth lawn, rockery, flower borders and patio stretched away outside ending at an old stone wall. It was very gracious. The girl perched on the edge of a bamboo chair, her feet tapping on the wooden floor. She nibbled at a finger end, all her nails were chewed and the skin around them was red and sore looking. Estella kept her eyes downcast, glancing now and then towards the window but avoiding eye contact. It was textbook ‘kid with something to hide’.