Death's Door bs-17

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘She never mentioned a surname? You’re sure?’

  ‘Certain. She only ever called him Dominic, or Dom.’

  ‘How long did they see each other?’

  ‘A few months.’

  ‘Might it have carried on up to the time of her death?’

  ‘No,’ Gavin replied firmly. ‘When Stacey graduated and moved back in with us to save money while she built up her reputation, and established regular sales, I asked her about him, “How’s Dom?” just casually. She just smiled and said, “He’s off down the road,” her way of saying that it was all over. She wasn’t upset, though,’

  ‘Mmm.’ Singh paused. ‘I don’t suppose you found a photo of him, sir, among your daughter’s personal stuff? Maybe something taken in a group?’

  The father chuckled. ‘No, but I can do better than that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘His portrait’s upstairs. Stacey painted him. That’s what they were doing up in the attic: he was sitting for her. That’s how I know he’s well built: it’s a nude.’

  ‘She kept it?’

  ‘Yes. I was up in the studio one day and she showed me it. She said that she’d have given it to him, but that he didn’t stick around long enough.’

  ‘Is it . . . how do I put this, sir? Is it a good likeness of him?’

  ‘I can only speak for the part above the neck, Mr Singh, but if the rest of him is as near lifelike as that, he’s an impressive bloke.’

  In other circumstances Singh might have laughed, but his mind was focused. ‘Would you mind if I borrowed it, sir? If it’s that good I’d like to copy it. We may need to find this man.’

  Gavin’s tone became serious once more. ‘Sure. Come on out; I’ll look it out and bubble-wrap it for you. Handle it carefully, though.’

  ‘Be sure of that, sir. It’ll be as precious to me as it is to you and Mrs Gavin.’

  Thirty-four

  ‘You know, Andy,’ said Mario McGuire, ‘if I ever aspire to chief officer rank, which I won’t, by the way, I’d like it to be in a place like this.’

  ‘There’s worse,’ Deputy Chief Constable Andrew Martin conceded, as the two men stared along the length of Loch Tay. ‘But you have scenery as nice as this in the patch you’re in just now. There are some lovely spots in East Lothian and down in the borders.’

  ‘True, but the incidence of crime in those spots is remarkably low, and crime is what I do, remember.’

  ‘And out here . . . In fact, the incidence of anything is bloody rare out here. Why do you think I grabbed the chance to chum you on this interview?’

  ‘Do I detect that you’ve had enough of the silvery Tay?’ McGuire quizzed.

  ‘Let’s just say that I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life here.’

  ‘And Proud Jimmy goes next year.’

  ‘And Bob’s in line to succeed him,’ said Martin, quickly. ‘There are other jobs; there’s Aberdeen, for example, then there’s Glasgow. They’ll be looking for a deputy in the Strathclyde force next year. But who says I’m stuck in Scotland? The chief in Northumbria has only two years to go, and there’s the Thames Valley area.’

  ‘You’re a jock copper, Andy; you wouldn’t go south. Plus, I seem to remember that you never sold Karen’s flat in Edinburgh after the two of you got married, so you’re still on the property ladder there.’

  Martin laughed. ‘Stop being a bloody detective, man. Let’s get serious and go and see these people.’

  They climbed back into the deputy chief’s car. They had met up at the tourist office at Aberfeldy, but the Paul family lived not in the town itself but a short distance away. The stop-off in the tiny village of Kenmore, where the River Tay flows into the loch that bears its name, had been made simply to allow them to catch up with each other’s news.

  ‘Do you know anything about the couple?’ McGuire asked, as they drove off.

  ‘Why should I?’ the DCC replied. ‘This is your interview; I’m just the legal necessity here.’

  ‘Because old detectives never die, and they never talk to people on a business basis without knowing as much as they can in advance.’

  ‘Okay, I admit it, I ran a check. Colonel Travers Paul is fifty-six, and he’s retired. He was educated at Strathallan School, went to Sandhurst and served in the army for twelve years, until he was invalided out post-Falklands. From there, he joined a big tobacco company, and was a senior executive, working in Africa and latterly in the US, until he chucked it four years ago. He still has a consultancy role with the firm, but he spends most of his time in voluntary work. He’s chair of the community council, and he and his wife have owned their present home for seventeen years. His interests include fishing . . . he’s a supporter of the Atlantic Salmon Trust . . . and he’s a regular at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. He and his wife Marietta have been married for twenty-eight years and Harry was their only son. I got all that from his official biog on the council website. They’re members of the Church of Scotland, and regular attenders at the parish church in Aberfeldy. She’s active in the care group, and in the guild. I got that from the minister. Harry, on the other hand, hasn’t been seen in the place since he chucked the local youth group when he was seventeen, after what was described as an “incident” at a dance where his band was playing. According to the long-serving local constable, it involved his being caught by one of the supervising adults, horizontal jogging behind the kirk during a break, with a girl from Pitlochry. There was a row, the bloke said something crude about the lass, young Harry chinned him, and his band never finished the gig.’

  ‘Pitlochry’s beyond the pale around here, is it?’ McGuire chuckled. Then he frowned. ‘Poor lad. Shagging never did him a lot of good, did it? First it got him kicked out of the church and then it got him shot in the head.’

  ‘Let’s not put that thought to the parents,’ Martin murmured. He drew to a halt as he saw a police vehicle parked by the roadside, then got out and walked towards the uniformed officers who were standing beside it. They saluted as he approached. ‘Any press turned up?’ he asked the older of the two, a sergeant.

  ‘Quite a few, sir,’ the heavily built man replied. ‘We’ve had a couple of television crews, some photographers, and a freelance scribbler who covers the area around here, all more or less at the same time. We told them that the Pauls aren’t seeing anybody, and most of them understood that. The local guy knows the colonel; he told me he’d spoken to him on the phone already, but he wasn’t letting on to the rest. One of the television reporters got a bit stroppy, but she realised it wasn’t getting her anywhere so she shut up. They all took some shots of the house and the loch, hung about for a while, then pissed off.’

  ‘Fine. That’s probably all you’ll have, but stay here for another two hours, just in case. We’ll go on up to the house.’

  He returned to his car, drove past the patrol vehicle and turned off the loch-side road into a long drive that led up to an impressive stone villa. The roadway was covered by a heavy layer of red gravel chips, which crunched under the tyres, giving an audible warning of their approach.

  As they drew up at the front-door steps, a tall man walked round from the side of the house. He wore a green sweater over a white shirt, and his dark trousers were tucked into an outsized pair of old-fashioned wellington boots. His complexion was ruddy, and crinkly grey hair was swept back from his forehead.

  ‘You’ll be the police,’ he exclaimed, in a crusty accent that sounded only faintly Scottish. He focused on the fair-haired ACC. ‘And you’ll be Mr Martin,’ he added. ‘I recognise you from your picture in the last community newsletter.’

  ‘That’s right, Colonel Paul, and this is DCS McGuire from Edinburgh.’

  ‘Colonel, eh?’ Travis Paul retorted. ‘You’ve been doing your homework. My military handle’s only used in official publications these days; my company’s annual report, that sort of stuff. You’ll be getting used to this, Mr McGuire,’ he said to the detective grimly. ‘I suppose you’ll h
ave had a similar meeting with the Boras girl’s parents.’

  ‘There are some things that you never get used to, sir.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ He sighed; his face bore the lines of one who had missed a night’s sleep. ‘I had that duty myself, in the army, a long time ago. I lost a few men in Ireland, and more in the Falklands. I appreciate the guard you’ve given us,’ he said to Martin. ‘I’d have been rather abrupt if I’d had the press knocking on the door today, I’m afraid. Come into the house: my wife’s waiting for us there. I’ve been killing time, and weeds, in the garden.’

  He led them up the steps, pausing to remove a little mud from his boots on a black iron scraper by the door. The entrance hall was wide and imposing, panelled from floor to ceiling in oak that the police officers guessed had been there since the house was built. Paul pointed to the right. ‘In there.’

  As they entered, Marietta Paul rose from a big wicker-framed armchair that looked entirely out of place in a Scottish drawing room. As he introduced her to the visitors, her husband caught Martin’s quick glance. ‘I’m a collector,’ he explained. ‘I brought that chair back from Savannah, Georgia.’ He pointed to a massive display case against the back wall. ‘That thing came from Nairobi. If you look inside it you’ll see various bits of metal that came from the Falklands. They were dug out of me, after one of my guys stepped on a land-mine. He was killed, I was torn up by sharpnel.’ He looked directly at McGuire. ‘I suppose you’re going to ask me to look at Harry in much the same condition.’

  ‘No, sir, I’m not. We’ve got a positive identification on your son’s body from his medical records.’

  ‘The plate in his leg?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But we want to see him,’ the ghost-faced mother protested.

  ‘There’s no need,’ McGuire told her.

  ‘But it’s our right.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed, ‘but maybe you’d better not.’

  ‘Exit wound?’ Paul asked quietly, looking away from his wife, so that she could not hear the question.

  The big detective shook his head, moving closer to him. ‘No, sir, but Harry’s body was hidden for over twenty-four hours, and exposed to scavengers.’

  ‘I understand.’ He turned back to Mrs Paul. ‘We’ll take the officer’s advice, dear. It’s in our interests. Now, Mr Martin, Mr McGuire, please sit and let’s get down to business. What happened to our son?’

  ‘He was shot twice in the head from a range of about four feet. We believe that the murderer had been stalking them since the previous night, and that he must have followed them to North Berwick, where they went to sell some of Zrinka’s pictures. They caught the bus to Gullane; we guess that he followed them in a car, from a distance. We know that he wasn’t a passenger himself. We’re not sure about what happened next, but we reckon that he trailed them all the way down to the beach, where they pitched their tent.’

  ‘Why there? Why did they go there?’

  ‘We know that Zrinka visited the vicinity with her parents, when she was nine years old. It’s our guess that camping there was her idea. They may have been there before, for all we know, but last Monday was probably the first night of the year that’s been warm enough.’

  ‘And he killed them there?’

  ‘We believe that he watched them all night, from somewhere very close by. Zrinka was found on the beach. Harry was killed in the tent; we know that for sure, thanks to our lab people. Our supposition is that she decided to go for a walk, and that Harry stayed in the tent. When she had gone, the murderer emerged from his hiding place and shot your son. He then followed Zrinka and killed her, probably at the spot where she was found.

  ‘Finally, he went back to the tent and hid Harry’s body, clothes and rucksack, while leaving her things for us to find. He was probably hoping that we’d assume that Harry was the killer and that we’d waste time starting a search for him.’ McGuire paused. ‘But our people at the scene didn’t fall for that one.’

  ‘I see.’ Colonel Paul sighed. ‘What can we do?’ he asked. ‘How can we help you catch this murdering bastard?’

  ‘We need to know everything you can tell us about Zrinka Boras,’ the chief superintendent answered, ‘anything that Harry might have told you about her.’

  ‘Are you looking for a jilted lover?’ Marietta Paul asked.

  ‘It’s too early to say that, although we are trying to find any connections between Zrinka and Stacey Gavin, a girl who was killed two months ago, and a man remains a possibility. At the moment our thinking is that Zrinka was the target, not Harry; he may have been killed just because he was unlucky enough to have been there.’

  ‘Stacey Gavin?’ the woman repeated.

  ‘Yes. Harry didn’t know her too, did he?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’ She looked at her husband. ‘Did he ever mention her to you, Trav?’

  ‘He did, actually, but only in the context of a television report of her murder that we were both watching. It was midweek, but Harry used to come up then, since most of his band engagements were at weekends. They showed a picture of her, and he said, “Poor kid, she looks really nice. I hope they catch the . . .” I won’t repeat the word he used, dear.’

  ‘What about Zrinka?’ McGuire continued. ‘Were you aware of their relationship?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Marietta replied. ‘Harry brought her up here. She was a lovely girl.’ Her voice faltered for a moment, as she fought to keep a sob at bay. ‘It’s just devastating that this should happen to two young people; young, so young. How could it? How could it?’ As the two police officers looked on, embarrassed and sympathetic, she broke down.

  ‘Do you mind if we continue this without my wife?’ asked Paul.

  ‘For the moment, not at all, sir,’ Martin told him.

  ‘In that case, let me take her upstairs. I’ll rejoin you in a moment.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So Harry was still well in the bosom of the family,’ McGuire murmured, as the couple left the room.

  ‘Going back to what you were saying earlier,’ his colleague said, ‘would you cut yourself off from a place like this? Look at that view.’

  They stood and gazed in silence through a big picture window that offered a panoramic vista from the hillside across the shining waters of Loch Tay and down its length. The day was calm and one or two boats were out, anglers with rods in the water. ‘I take your point,’ the Edinburgh policeman conceded eventually. ‘Even for a boy with dreams of making it big as a musician, this is fucking paradise. Not a lot to do, I guess, but a hell of a place to practise.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Travers Paul from the doorway, as he rejoined them. ‘We’ve both been devastated since we heard the news. It took a big effort on Marietta’s part to meet you at all; she really isn’t up to it, you know. Not for now, at any rate.’

  ‘Sure,’ said McGuire, as they returned to their seats. ‘We both understand that, so don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Thanks. You were asking about Zrinka, before.’

  ‘Yes. What did you know of her?’

  ‘Very little; Harry only brought her here twice. I knew that she was British, because the first time I asked her what her nationality was. She laughed and said that sometimes she wondered herself, given her Balkan ancestry, but that she was born in Yugoslavia, that her parents had migrated to the UK and that she had become a naturalised British subject at the same time as them. She had a very slight accent, assimilated from her home surroundings, I suppose, just as Harry’s accent had a touch of American in it from the time we spent in Georgia. I knew what she did, of course; she was a very talented young artist. The second time she came, about three weeks ago, she gave us a picture. It’s over there, in fact.’ He pointed towards the wall, beside the door, at a water-colour that hung there. It was bright and vivid and showed the scene that the two police officers had been admiring a few minutes before.

  McGuire rose from his chair, walked round, and examined it cl
osely. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen Zrinka’s work,’ he said, as he returned. ‘I’ve a bit of a personal interest,’ he explained. ‘My mother paints, now that she’s retired to Italy. You’re right: the poor kid was damn good. My boss has one of her pictures, as a matter of fact.’

  Martin glanced at him. ‘Bob? Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. Stevie Steele told me.’

  ‘How did he find that out?’

  ‘One of his DCs lives next door to Alex. She told him, and he told Stevie. Bizarrely enough he has one of Stacey’s too.’

  ‘Bob always was a bit of a closet art lover. He gave Karen and me a picture as a wedding present. It’s by a Catalan artist he discovered in L’Escala, called Nada Sebastian. You should check her out; she has a website. Her name, that’s all it is.’ The deputy chief constable looked back at Paul. ‘I’m sorry, sir, we’re sidetracking here.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Martin, I started it off.’

  ‘Did you know anything else about her parents, other than that they were originally from Bosnia?’

  ‘I didn’t even know that. She used the term Yugoslavia when she spoke about it, as it would have been when they left, I suppose.’

  ‘How long had Zrinka’s relationship with Harry been going on?’ McGuire asked.

  ‘Not long. About three months, as far as I can recall. He told us not to read anything into it, that they were friends as much as anything else, but they were very relaxed in each other’s company, very affectionate, and they had that way of looking at each other that suggested it might be more serious than either of them was letting on, or even appreciated. Zrinka talked to Marietta about it, though. She told her that she liked Harry very much, but that she was careful, and was taking her time, because of family circumstances, she said, but most of all because she had been badly let down by someone in the past.’

  ‘Did she mention a name?’

  ‘No, she didn’t. Although Marietta said that she was very frank about it. She told her that meeting us had confirmed her good feelings about Harry. She said that he was helping her get over her earlier experience.’