Song of the Dead

by Douglas Lindsay

  There will probably be something, somewhere. Everybody has it. Everybody has something, don’t they? A secret. A trial. Something that weighs them down. Something that consumes them in the dark moments.

  I don’t know what it is with Nat. His wife is great, the kids don’t seem as annoying as most other people’s kids.

  It’s kind of weird to witness a life that seems so untroubled – I had Sunday lunch with them a few weeks ago, and it felt like walking onto the set of one of those happy family fifties US sitcoms – but then, Nat has to do police work. His own life may be all right, but he’s still being presented with this ongoing tale of drunken, drug-addled woe on a daily basis. Messes with you in one way or another. Perhaps Nat’s way is to surround himself with family, and make sure it’s as good as it can be.

  Or maybe he just got lucky.

  25

  Back to Perth by the same route, and then hit the A9. Long ago gave in to the flow of traffic. No point in getting annoyed. No point in thinking that you can get to the other end any faster than you’re ever going to. No point in imagining that you’re going to be able to overtake all the trucks and caravans on the meagre stretches of dual carriageway, or that there’s not going to be another one just around the corner on the single carriageway if you do. Accept it, take your time.

  Hungry, so stop in the Shell garage on the way out of Perth. Buy a prawn sandwich, a bag of Kettle Chips, a KitKat, bottle of water and a coffee. Use the bathroom.

  She asked me if I wanted to have lunch before I headed off. Sergeant Edelman. Maybe she didn’t find me as rude as I’d thought I came across. I said no. I said I had to get on the road. In that, at least, I wasn’t lying. I hope I wasn’t rude in saying no, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.

  I said I’d be in touch. I think she might have been embarrassed about the lunch suggestion.

  I get a clear run largely to the end of Drumochter, then everything slows up. A Tesco lorry. That’s all it takes. Big fellows to get past as well. Only one person tries. Horns blare. This time no one dies.

  They should give out patience at either end of the road. Or perhaps upgrade the whole thing to dual carriageway. Then again, it doesn’t go directly to Edinburgh, so why would they?

  * * *

  Phone starts ringing around Daviot, not far short of Inverness. Dual carriageway by now, the traffic flying. Down the hill, the big sweep back up. I lift it to see who’s calling. No name. It could be some crappy junk voicemail on a subject I know nothing about, as I always cut them off before they get anywhere near the point of what they want me to buy. But I get that feeling. The one that insists I pick it up, just in case.

  There’s a parking spot fast approaching, check of the mirror, foot on the brakes, and swerve quickly off the road. A guy blares his horn at me as he goes by, but he wasn’t even close. Just one of those people, doing it because he can.

  ‘Westphall.’

  ‘Inspector…’

  It’s the DHM from Tallinn. He could be calling about anything. Baden is still out there, and very soon the Estonians are going to tire of him, and they will release him and it will be up to the Embassy to help get him home. There could be developments around the body harvesting farmhouse. There could be developments on any aspect of the case coming from the Estonian police. But that’s not it. I can tell from his tone. One word, three syllables, that’s all it takes, and I know why he’s calling.

  ‘Kenneth,’ I say.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some…’ he begins, but stops himself, words catching.

  He looked like he cared. He’d obviously been troubled by what to do about Dorothy for a few weeks, and then I walked into his office, and he thought, here’s a chance to give Dorothy something to do. Get her to take a break, visit a friend, but combine it with doing the police, and the Embassy, a favour.

  Maybe it never even seemed like a good idea to him at the time. It was just an idea, and he took the chance.

  ‘Dorothy never went to Paris. She called her friend, said she was exhausted after the drive, and that she’d spend the night in Brussels in a hotel… She said she’d go on to Paris this morning.’

  I know what’s coming. I’ve seen the hotel room. I know what happened. I know what went through her head. And now, sitting here at the side of the A9 on the approach to Inverness, I can see her sitting in the bath, the water turned red.

  And there it is, that thing that was just out of reach, the reason the thought of Dorothy had been troubling me. That was why she told me her story. It doesn’t matter how fanciful it was. It doesn’t matter if it was true. Perhaps the whole thing was a fabrication of a deluded, ill mind. That she told me, that she chose her moment to finally let it out, showed that she’d made her decision. It was time to go. It was time to give up.

  Her telling me was her last act. The passing on of her narrative. Making sure her story was known, and that it would not die with her.

  I should have known. Should have seen it coming, and not just as a quiet, troubled voice at the back of my head.

  And what would I have done?

  * * *

  Knock on his door, wait for the call, and enter. He’s sitting at his desk, music playing quietly on an iPod. As is usually the case with him, it’s film music. I sometimes wonder if he intends it to be scene appropriate, appropriate to the act that he imagines is about to play out in the office, although of course he always turns it off when he’s talking to someone, in person or on the phone.

  He clicks it off, just as I was beginning to recognise it. The music is gone, the tune leaves my head and instantly I’ve forgotten it.

  He looks tired. I wasn’t fearful of his reaction, but I have been constructing some sort of argument in my head to defend myself. Sitting down across the desk from him I realise I likely won’t need it.

  ‘I’m going to send you on one of those courses,’ he says.

  ‘What courses?’

  ‘Overcoming fear of flying.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. You’re booked on it two weeks today. As long as this is cleared up by then. If not, we’ll get it pushed back.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can. The courses are aimed at people like you.’

  ‘With all due respect…’

  ‘You can go on the course, or you can face a charge of insubordination and disobeying an order, with a potential suspension and loss of rank. If you’d prefer to go in front of the police tribunal then we can arrange for that to happen.’

  Steady look across the table. I know which one I choose. I’m not going on one of those courses. They’re not for people like me, they really aren’t. Is there a section, for example, where they address the fear you feel as a result of being in a helicopter that was fired upon and hit by the Taliban?

  They might point out that that’s unlikely to happen to your EasyJet flight to Marbella. But I know which I’d rather take. I’m not getting on the flight. I’d take the suspension. I’d take the demotion. I’d take dismissal.

  It’s a pointless exercise. I know, he knows. I might never have to get on a plane again in my police career, and if I do, it’s liable to be in the next week to return to Estonia. He thought of a compromise because he doesn’t want to discipline his senior officer. This is his way out. I appreciate that’s what he’s trying to do.

  And it’s not that I don’t want to give him his way out. I can’t, that’s all.

  It’s not for now, however. There’s a case to be solved, a strange one at that. He doesn’t really know me well, not yet. It’s only been seven years. If I refuse, he might well imagine I’m playing a game, trying to call his bluff. I don’t mean to, I don’t want to.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘You’ll go on the course?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t have you doing this. It was round the station in minutes. If they see you doing that, how do you think it makes them feel? What message does it send?’

  He’s not looking for
me to answer. So I don’t. There’s a pause. A long-held stare across the desk.

  ‘You’ve got nothing to say?’

  ‘I thought the questions were rhetorical,’ I say, trying not to sound glib.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know my history, sir.’

  ‘It was seven years ago, Inspector.’

  ‘Not so long.’

  With fear, a lifetime isn’t so long. He knows that. He has nothing else to say. If at some point he imagined a great dressing-down because he’d ordered me to face my greatest fear and I cracked, it’s vanished over the previous forty-eight hours. Over the time it took me to make my convoluted way home.

  ‘And you told a Sergeant Edelman in Anstruther about Baden?’

  ‘It seemed preposterous not to, sir.’

  And so it was. I’m not letting him go anywhere near that one. He can be mad at me if he likes, he can find some spurious reason to mark down my annual report if he wants, when he’s really doing it because of this. It’s up to him. But keeping cases to yourself is just plain stupid.

  He presses the intercom. ‘Is Natterson in the station?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Send him in.’

  He finally breaks the stare, looks down at the file that’s open in front of him. Lifts a pen, taps it a couple of times. I spoke to Natterson earlier, before and after going to Anstruther. The care home acknowledged that at one time there had been a sister who came, but that Elsa always refused to see her. They said they couldn’t give me any contact details for her. I put Natterson on to the task of locating her, while I went to Anstruther. Not that I quite couched it in those terms.

  Natterson comes into the room, nods at me, sits down.

  ‘Nat,’ says Quinn, with a nod, ‘I know it might be awkward for you, but I’m going to leave you in charge of the case. The Inspector will do what you tell him. It’s the way it’s going to be on this one, as a result of what happened in Tallinn.’

  We both nod. What happened in Tallinn. Like some black and white, tension-filled spy movie from the early sixties, starring a couple of guys you’ve never heard of before, and a cameo from Orson Welles, mailing it in and owning every scene. That all it amounted to was me hiring a car rather than getting on a plane doesn’t sound so terribly exciting.

  The part of the story with Dorothy doesn’t really belong in a movie from the early sixties. I’m not sure where it belongs.

  I need to examine it. I need to think about every minute I spent with her, every word that she said. I need to hear it again in my head, play it back over. That’s for later, however. For the moment, I need to concentrate on the peculiarities of this case. And I need to remember my place.

  ‘We’ll discuss where you’ve both got to, and then you can bring it together, Nat.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’ve already brought each other up to speed?’

  We both nod, although I haven’t seen Nat since I got back.

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Are we any closer to explaining why we have two sets of identical DNA from two different people? Answer that, it seems to me, and we’ll be a long way to explaining this ridiculous situation.’

  Ridiculous. Nice way to put it.

  ‘There’s the possibility that they were twins,’ says Natterson.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve got the request for further examination of the DNA, so we’ll need to see how that plays out.’

  That’s an interesting way of putting it from Natterson. How it plays out. The DNA of identical twins seems to be just that – identical – unless you want to spend a lot of money getting a month-long test run on the two sets to pare them back to the most basic level possible. Seeing how it plays out will mean Quinn being persuaded that it’s worthwhile doing, and spending what might well be a quarter of the station’s annual budget on one case.

  ‘Without that, though, we’re not going to know whether the DNA, if it contains minor discrepancies, shows the men to have been twins, or whether, if it’s exactly the same down to the sub-microscopic level, we’re looking at the DNA of the same man.’

  ‘Is it possible there was a twin?’

  He looks at us both.

  ‘Absolutely no sign of that whatsoever. If there was a twin, he was a secret.’

  ‘We need to explore that nevertheless,’ says Quinn. He takes a moment, taps a finger on the desk. ‘Any other possibilities?’

  ‘The most obvious is that the DNA we have here, on record, was somehow taken from the man who is currently in Estonia, twelve years ago.’

  Quinn grunts.

  ‘Or that someone in Estonia is sending us duff gen,’ adds Natterson.

  Duff gen. There’s really no excuse for that phrase. Game face.

  ‘Intentionally false, rather than duff,’ I venture, although I immediately kick myself as it feels a little like competing with him.

  Quinn nods and looks back at Natterson.

  ‘That’s what I meant,’ he says. ‘Under this scenario, the Estonians still had Baden’s DNA on record from twelve years ago. Someone in their police force wants us to believe that this man is Baden, so they send this DNA.’

  ‘Why would they want us to think that?’

  He shakes his head. They both look at me. I’m the one who’s just been to Estonia after all.

  ‘The detective… my contact, Kuusk, seemed like a decent guy. His boss was a little passive aggressive, but she seemed to know what she was doing. There was definitely something going on down at that farmhouse, though. I mean, other than what had been taking place. There are layers of stuff that I don’t know about, and didn’t get close to investigating. And of course, I don’t know the language, so who knows what they were saying to each other.’

  ‘All right,’ says Quinn, ‘anything else? Any other possible explanations? You double-checked against a basic mistake?’

  ‘Triple,’ says Natterson. I know him. He probably octuple-checked against a mistake.

  ‘So, what else?’

  Quinn opens his hands, inviting in all possibilities. Natterson has nothing. He shakes his head. I don’t really have much either, but my head is full of Dorothy’s story, the absurdity of it. The notion that anything is possible.

  ‘Maybe there really were two John Badens,’ I say.

  They look at me.

  ‘How d’you mean?’ asks Quinn.

  ‘There were two of him. One of him died. The other was kidnapped.’

  ‘But how could there be two of him?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, and I know it doesn’t make sense. Maybe he split into two in some sort of strange metaphysical way. Some sort of psychosis, schizophrenia maybe, that manifested itself… that somehow manifested itself physically.’

  I don’t seem to be getting much enthusiasm for that suggestion. Staring curiously, they’re making me feel slightly uncomfortable, although probably because I made them feel uncomfortable first.

  Perhaps this is the lasting impact of my twenty-four hours with Dorothy; an openness to accept the possibility of the implausible.

  ‘Maybe something happened with time,’ I add, with a slight movement of the hand. ‘Maybe one of him walked in from a parallel world.’

  Quinn isn’t entirely looking at me like I just arrived from a science fiction convention dressed as a Klingon, but there’s not a lot of credence behind the eyes.

  ‘Or maybe we can keep it grounded in reality,’ he says curtly.

  ‘Either,’ says Natterson quickly, to move the conversation on from my brief excursion into a fantasy netherworld that clearly doesn’t exist, ‘we’re looking at the twin angle, or there was some duplicity taking place twelve years ago, or in Estonia today. I think that’s where we should be concentrating for the moment.’

  Quinn nods.

  ‘Yes. Spend a little more time on Baden’s younger self, his life leading up to his death. We need to know if there was the slightest hint of some other brother wh
o was never recorded. Maybe we even need to go back to his birth. Look at his birth certificate, check the hospital where he was born. Perhaps the parents wanted to keep the twin off the grid for some reason. People do the most peculiar and criminal things, so you never know.’

  ‘One of us should speak to Rosco,’ I venture.

  The usual Rosco shadow crosses his face, but he nods all the same. A dark, grudging nod. Talk of Rosco is as liable to be uncomfortable for everyone as talk of the physical manifestations of a split personality. Rosco, at least, is grounded in the real world.

  Quinn stares at an indistinct point on the floor between me and Natterson. We wait in silence. No one talks about Rosco around here, at least not when Quinn’s around. Nearly cost him his job.

  ‘You’d better handle that,’ he says looking up at me, eventually. I can feel Natterson’s relief.

  ‘I wondered, also,’ I begin, ‘if I shouldn’t try to speak to my old crew. Still got a couple of connections in London. See if there’s anything on Estonia that the DHM at the Embassy didn’t tell me, or that maybe he doesn’t know.’

  ‘Yes, that makes sense.’

  The thought of Rosco, and at what he sees as a troubling case, is still showing on his face, the creased brow, the lugubrious downturn of the lips.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s how we’ll split it. Nat, you continue to follow the current events. Speak to anyone who knew Baden and Emily King. Ben, you look into what happened twelve years ago. And, you know, do the other thing with your old lot.’

  I like how people can’t even say SIS sometimes, as though just acknowledging the name is breaking the Official Secrets Act. I mean, seriously… They have a website! They use their actual building in James Bond movies!

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  A nod and then Natterson and I rise and leave the room, closing the door quickly behind us. Out into the small, open-plan office at the heart of the station. The usual quiet bustle, seven or eight people, a mix of police and civilians, going about their business.

  ‘Right…,’ says Natterson.