‘It’s too late, Inspector,’ he says. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get in a bit early so I can ask for the next few days off.’
27
Walk back into the station. Need a cup of coffee, tiredness having swept in. Despite the decent night’s sleep in Glasgow last night, it’ll take a day or two to fully recover from the drive through the night with Dorothy.
Dorothy, and her sad story, comes and goes. The guilt sits upon me. Stupid guilt. Like there was anything I could have done. If I spoke to someone – did she want me to speak to someone, was that why she told me – what would they think? What would they think of her tale? They would think she was making it up, telling stories. If they thought she actually believed it, as I am absolutely sure that she did, then they would think her ill.
So why then am I so unquestioning? And does my credulity make me more open to some incredible explanation for the mystery of Baden and the two men with identical DNA?
Sit down across from Natterson. He’s on the phone, although he hangs up as soon as I appear. Detective Sergeant Sutherland is sitting beside him.
‘Ben,’ says Natterson. One cup of coffee in my hand, I’m immediately aware of my selfishness.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
Sutherland shakes his head.
‘It’s fine,’ says Natterson. ‘Had one earlier… You spoke to Rosco?’
The civility of Natterson. He probably had a coffee six hours ago.
‘Yes. On his way to work.’
I imagine Rosco the following day, drunk and hopeless, and have to forcefully remove the image from my head. Take some coffee, shake my head, as though the physical act will help dislodge the picture of despair.
‘You look tired.’
I wave it away.
‘He’s not talking. There’s something there, but I don’t know what. Rosco… I don’t know if there was anything particular to that investigation with Rosco, but there’s some all right stuff on his record beforehand, and nothing after it. I feel like we need to get to the bottom of it to help with this.’
‘Speak to his ex-wife?’
‘I called, didn’t get her. I’m not sure though. The fact that she left him… Maybe she was just part of the problem. Maybe she was an escape, and then she realised that’s all she was to him, and wasn’t committed enough to stick around.’
Like I would know anything about commitment. Natterson doesn’t say anything to that. Maybe he’s thinking about himself and Ellen. Maybe he’s wondering if I just read that in Cosmopolitan while waiting at the dentist’s.
‘But we should talk to her tomorrow. I’ll try to get hold of her in the morning. We can imagine all sorts, because this seems like a complex business, but maybe all that happened was that he was drinking from day one, and she mistakenly thought she could stop him. Maybe he slept with someone else. Maybe she knows nothing about the Tallinn business and what it did to him, even though they married shortly afterwards. Presumably they were together when he went out there.’
‘You’ll talk to her, or d’you…’
‘I’ll do it.’
Look at my watch. I shouldn’t leave it until tomorrow.
‘We didn’t talk about our hit-and-run with Quinn,’ says Natterson.
‘Where are we with that?’
Natterson looks at Sutherland.
‘Analysis of the paint left on the clothes of the victim indicate the car was a Ford vehicle. Although we’ve had differing eyewitness accounts of the vehicle, the consensus appears to be that it was most likely a Mondeo. White. We’ve no number plate. Waverley was walking along the High Street, the Mondeo left the road, took him out at a pace, then headed quickly up Park and turned left onto the eight sixty-two. There was one guy who decided to try to follow him, rather than stop to help the victim, but he lost him out of town, over the hill on the Ullapool road. We think maybe he took the Marybank turn-off, then went who knows… possibly back through Beauly to Inverness. Could have gone anywhere. We’ve been looking at what CCTV we have for the area, but as you know, it’s not especially extensive.’
‘Is it possible the car just lost control? The driver was using their iPod or spilled their Starbucks mochaccino?’
‘Possible. If you want to kill someone, hitting them with a car isn’t the best option, if you’re only going to hit them once,’ says Natterson nodding. ‘More liable just to leave them hospitalised.’
‘Maybe that’s all that was intended,’ says Sutherland. ‘Basically, though, we don’t know. With a lot of accidental hits the car will slow down, there’ll be that moment of oh crap, what have I done, should I stop? before the panic sets in. This guy was gone, like hitting Waverley and escaping were all part of the process.’
‘Where have we got to on a possible connection between Waverley and Baden?’ asks Natterson.
‘Thunderbirds are go,’ says Sutherland, with no affectation at all.
Everybody at the station likes Sutherland. Decent man, honest, always has time for people. More than anything, just damned good at his job. And he says things like Thunderbirds are go.
‘They were at Aberdeen together.’
‘Same time as Emily King,’ says Natterson, and Sutherland nods.
‘All three of them together.’
‘Was he doing the same course as the other two?’
‘No, he wasn’t. Waverley was doing economics and philosophy. But they were all in the Young Conservatives Association.’
‘There was a Young Conservatives Association at Aberdeen?’
‘Still is,’ he says.
‘Anything further?’
‘Not much. I was thinking we need to go there tomorrow, speak to a few people, see what kind of records there are.’
‘The main thing, though, is that there’s a definite link,’ says Natterson. ‘It means the hit-and-run stops looking like a coincidence and becomes part of the story.’
‘Rosco’s wife is in Aviemore,’ I throw into the mix. ‘We could combine that with going to Aberdeen.’
‘Yes,’ says Natterson, ‘that’d be good. OK, OK, what else do we have?’
‘Did you speak to Elsa’s sister?’
‘Didn’t manage to have much of a chat, but I did arrange to go by and see her in the morning. I’ll go to Inverness early, then Aberdeen, come back via Aviemore. That should work out all right.’
I almost point out that Quinn’s instructions had been for me to tackle the historic aspects of the case, and the investigation in Aberdeen is just that, but that would be getting into something incredibly petty, so I don’t go there. It just points to the fact that this whole thing is a bit messy and directionless. My fault for taking the car rather than the plane.
Have to stop beating myself up about it.
‘Room Two’s clear at the moment, isn’t it?’ I ask.
Natterson looks at Sutherland for confirmation and nods.
‘We should set up the room. This thing is getting pretty broad, we need to try to bring it all together. We need to be able to look at the big picture.’
‘Of course. I’ll…’
‘I can do it if you like.’
Natterson hesitates a moment, then says, ‘Of course, that’d be great. Thanks, Ben.’
So Natterson does the historic stuff, and I try to pull the current investigation together. In complete contradiction of instructions from the top.
I feel like I’m stepping on his toes, and I have no idea what he’s thinking. Is he worried about stepping on my toes by making the Aberdeen trip? It’s all monumentally stupid, and would probably be overcome by talking it through, but then I don’t feel it’s my place to start the conversation, and I’d be worried that he’d take it the wrong way.
Time to stop overanalysing. Check my watch. The tiredness has cleared at just the thought of setting up a whiteboard. That’s all it took.
‘Right, I’ll get that going. Come in when you get the chance and we’ll go through things.’
‘You should
go home and get some rest,’ he says.
‘I’ll just do a couple of hours,’ I say, getting up.
Stop after a couple of paces. It’s not his place to tell me to go home and get some rest. Rest? Seriously? I don’t have to leave, just because he wants to go home to see his kids before they go to bed.
Hesitate, mainly because Sutherland is there, then turn back and decide to say what’s on my mind.
‘You have the case, Nat, you have the lead, but don’t tell me how to do my job, or how much I should be doing my job or when I should be doing my job.’
‘I just…’
He starts, but the sentence vanishes beneath his insecurity. The insecurity that I’ve just helped perpetuate. He was probably only trying to be nice.
And he’s right. I am tired. I catch Sutherland’s eye, then turn to go.
‘I’ll get Fisher to come in and fill you in on everything you’ve missed,’ says Natterson to my back. I pause for a moment, and walk through the open plan to the currently vacant Room Two.
28
Setting the boards up twenty minutes later when Constable Fisher knocks and enters.
Fisher is the kind of policewoman who, if she was ever killed on duty, would, without doubt, be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Young and attractive, just like all those white, male, middle-aged newspaper editors like them.
She has a story, of course. Everybody does. I’m not saying that without the story she’d be some shallow airhead, married to a Premier League footballer and living in a mansion in Cheshire, but it’s a shallow world, and people who look like Constable Fisher get on in it without too much effort.
Her father abused her up to the age of sixteen. Her mother knew what was going on, hated it, didn’t do anything about it. Fisher finally went to the police, the police didn’t want to know, or at least, they didn’t want to believe her. No good was going to come of believing that the local councillor, who’d been popular in their little part of Angus for over twenty years, was committing incest, rape, and child abuse.
She might have turned against the police. She might have hated them. She might have hated everybody. But she’s strong. Kept her nerve. Left home for a while, kept at it, didn’t let the naysayers get in the way. And then she found a sympathetic ear. A police sergeant willing to take up her case. One brave man. That was all it took.
Finally, after months of her father denying everything, and going so far as trying to get his daughter sectioned, the mother finally came to her rescue. It was two against one, and then the father crumbled. His world fell away from him. Was prosecuted and convicted. His wife stood by him nevertheless. As far as anyone knows, she’s still living in the same house waiting for her husband to get out of prison.
And young Fisher joined the police, determined that she would be the same kind of officer as the sergeant who’d helped her. That she would listen to every complaint, and not brush people off because what they were saying was going to be inconvenient.
She put her father in prison, and he deserved it. Strong woman, Constable Fisher.
‘Inspector Natterson thought you might want these details, sir,’ she says, holding a thin report.
‘OK, thanks Fish,’ I say. ‘Hey, you got a few minutes?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘OK. Just need to talk this through. You can sit down if you like.’
She knows I don’t want her advice or necessarily her input. Just someone to call me out on anything obvious that I’m missing, or spurious that I’m suggesting. I hear her sitting down, although I’ve now got my back turned. It’s about the boards.
On one, headlined Aberdeen, there are pinned pictures of Emily King and John Baden, taken from the original file, and the name of Andrew Waverley. King and Baden were studying biology. I need to find out what that involved in Aberdeen twelve years ago. This is where it starts, and this is where our knowledge is at its weakest.
‘You know something about this case?’ I ask. ‘You’ve looked at the files?’
‘Yes, sir, Inspector Natterson has me on the team.’
‘Was there anything, from twelve years ago, was there anything about Waverley? I mean, I don’t think there was, I don’t…’
‘Nothing, sir. We only made the connection after going back through Waverley’s life following his death.’
‘OK, OK. So, we’ll get that looked into tomorrow. This is a big empty hole that we need to fill. The next hole is here.’
Next board along. Estonia, twelve years ago. Once again we have John Baden and Emily King, which starts as a holiday and ends with King sitting alone in her hotel room and Baden dead in a lake. Something happened here, beyond what was in the files, and that’s the large hole we have to fill. The largest. Without filling it in, I don’t know that we can truly fill in the current hole.
‘Do we know if Waverley ever travelled to Estonia?’ I ask.
‘I’m not sure, sir. I saw somewhere that he’d travelled in Europe, so obviously that could have been it.’
‘We need to get on to that. If he’s dead now, it’s because of something he knows or something he did.’
‘If he’s dead? He’s definitely dead, sir.’
‘Yes, you know…’ and I finish the sentence with a wave of the hand.
Then we come to the third stage. Present day. Two of the three have been murdered, and the one we thought was already dead, comes back to life.
‘OK, tell me about Waverley. Was he married?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did they meet?’
‘Four years ago through an online dating site.’
Pause, turn round.
‘He met his wife online?’
‘Yes. She’s Thai.’
‘OK. The Inspector spoke to her?’
‘Yes, I was with him. She was a little upset. Just a little.’
‘Did she have any idea–?’
‘–None,’ she says, cutting me off.
‘He didn’t…?’ I start, then shake my head, because it’s hardly like I need to be politically correct for Constable Fisher’s sake. ‘He didn’t, like, go to Thailand and buy her, did he? Not that that would make any difference, I don’t think.’
‘She was already in Scotland. It would appear, from what she said, that her previous husband did just that. Brought her back from Thailand having gone through an agency. He died, his family cut her off. She said she was lonely and went looking for someone, but it might just be she needed the money.’
‘Have we checked out her story? It’s possible she got all the money, and now she’s looking for more.’
‘I think Sergeant Sutherland is on that, sir.’
‘OK, good. Right, the big question here, the head scratcher, is how the same DNA result could show up from two different people. D’you know where that initial DNA test was taken, and what it was taken from?’
‘I’m not sure, sir, I’ll need to check.’
‘Please do. You have any theories on how the two men could have the same DNA?’
‘Must either be twins, or there’s something dodgy happening, sir. Something from twelve years ago more than likely.’
‘Yes, that’s about the size of it.’
Look back at the boards. Tap a contemplative marker pen against one.
‘The holes in the first two are dwarfed by the gaping holes in the third. Two murders, and the curious instance of the matching DNA.’
Fisher doesn’t say anything, but I’m more or less done with her anyway. As usual, at this point in a case, the first job is in understanding where the gaps are in your knowledge. After that, you systematically start trying to fill those gaps. In some ways, even though I’ve been on this for a week now, it still feels like we’re at the beginning. Just getting to understand the gaps.
Suddenly I see the woman standing at the far end of the pier in Anstruther. The woman who I felt was watching me. The vision flashes across my head and then goes.
I turn and glance at Fi
sher, who is sitting on the edge of her seat, waiting to be dismissed, I think, rather than in excitement.
I stare at her, while I think about the woman on the pier. It was likely nothing. Why wouldn’t she have been looking at me? There were two of us on the pier. I was looking at her, after all.
Of course, I’m trying to be in denial about what’s in my mind. There seem to be two John Badens, why then wouldn’t there be two Emily Kings? Maybe one of them killed the other. Maybe one of them was standing on that pier watching me.
I’ll keep those thoughts to myself. Quinn might be pedantic, but he’s right this time. Let’s keep it in reality.
Suddenly realise that I’m hungry, and the tiredness is coming back. I need to call it a night, get some food, and get some sleep. I should call Vauxhall Cross, but I can do that in the morning. While Natterson’s on his way to Aberdeen.
‘Can I go, sir?’
* * *
I stop off at the supermarket on the way home and buy a meal for two for ten pounds. Two salmon en croute, potato wedges, two pieces of cheesecake and a bottle of Chilean sauvignon blanc.
I walk into the house, for the first time in over a week. It’s cold, and I remember that just before I left it had been mild for a couple of days and I’d turned the heating off. There will still be hot water, however.
I turn the heating on, put the food in the oven, and then go and stand under a warm shower.
When I eat dinner, I stack up the plate with both of the en croute, and most of the wedges, pour myself a large glass of wine, then go and sit at the table by the window, with the lights off. I eat in the dark, Dark On Fire on the CD player, looking out over the lights of Dingwall and what I can see of the Cromarty Firth.
The weekend is here, but it’s going to be a working one for many of us at the station, while we try to make progress on this. I need to speak to Tallinn again in the morning, to see if there have been any further developments. Somehow I doubt Baden will have said anything, but hopefully the police will have progressed a little further. I’ll call Kuusk and the Embassy. At some point, presumably, Baden is going to want to come home. Not that he’ll find anything, or anyone, when he gets here.
Song of the Dead Page 15