Death's Door bs-17

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘That’s what Zrinka wanted her to think. Wasnae true, though. My theory is . . .’ she looked at the detectives across her coffee table ‘. . . that he was a gold-digger.’

  ‘That’s a good old-fashioned term.’

  ‘It fitted him, though. I reckon he was after her because her old man’s filthy rich, and that Zrinka finally figured it out and bounced him. I suggested as much once, and she just said that if that was what I wanted to think it was all right by her.’

  ‘What about Harry?’

  Amy’s face seemed to light up. ‘Aw, Harry was different. He was such a nice guy; one for the women, right enough, but once he met Zrinka, that was that. It was me that introduced them.’

  ‘How did you come to meet Harry?’

  ‘Through A-Frame . . . Sorry, Lionel; Harry gave him that name and it stuck. He’s my boyfriend. I took Zrinka along to hear the band one night . . . You know Harry had a band?’ Singh nodded. ‘I never thought she’d fancy getting off with him, but she did. Shagged him that very night, so she told me afterwards. I thought it would be a one-nighter, but that’s not how it turned out: they were pretty much inseparable from then on. She even took an interest in Upload. Not that long ago she brought the three of them into the salon. She said that if they were going to cultivate a scruffy image, then at least it should be well-groomed scruffy. That was pure Zrinka.’

  ‘Have you spoken to A-Frame this afternoon?’

  Amy nodded, wiping a tear from a corner of her right eye. ‘He was the first person I called. He hadn’t heard. He was workin’ when I rang him. He’s still got a day job . . . just as well, now this has happened. He stacks shelves at Scotmid in Leith. He didn’t believe me at first, until I told him to tune in to the Radio Forth news at one. I’m meeting him tonight, him and Benjy . . . that’s the other lad in the band. We’re going to have a wake for Harry and Zrinka up in the Pear Tree. They’d a record deal, too. That’ll be well stuffed with Harry dead. He was the musician, you see, and the programmer. A-Frame does the drums, and Benjy does the keyboards, or so they say, but really they’re just machine operators.’

  ‘What’s Lionel’s surname?’ Singh asked.

  ‘Broad. Benjy’s is Malcolm; Benjamin Malcolm.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Steele. ‘Did Zrinka ever mention a woman called Stacey Gavin?’

  The girl squeezed her can even tighter as she nodded. ‘She was that other girl that got shot, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She knew her,’ she told them, ‘and so did I. That makes it all even scarier, I suppose.

  ‘Up at the art college in Lauriston, the final-year students have a show, where you can buy their work. Zrinka took me up there last summer, on a Saturday, just to have a look. “Let’s suss out the potential competition,” was how she put it, but she was laughing when she said it. Stacey was there, showing quite a lot of her work. It was really, really good, as good as Zrinka’s. It’s funny, I never really knew anything about art until I met those two. Now I’m quite keen on it. Zrinka persuaded me that what I do is art as well, in its own way.

  ‘Stacey had sold just about all of her stuff when we got to her. In fact, yes, that was what happened, she sold her last piece when we were talking to her. A man bought it; he said it would do nicely for his daughter’s new flat when she moved in. He was a nice guy; middle-aged, but he looked tough as fuck. He and Stacey did the deal, he took the picture away, and she said that was her done. So we went to the Pear Tree for a pint.’

  ‘Did you see anything of her after that?’

  ‘Zrinka did, more than me. She let her sell stuff off her stall last summer, until she had her own sales system lined up.

  ‘The two of them fell out, though. I think it must have been over that bastard Dominic. Zrinka found out that Stacey was going out with him. She warned her that he was a no-user, and Stacey didn’t like it. They had this discussion one lunch-time, when the three of us were in Bert’s Bar, along from the salon. It started off about Dominic; it wasn’t an argument or anything, Zrinka just said she was worried for Stacey. Stacey told her that her problem was that she never trusted any men, and Zrinka replied, “No, and you of all people shouldn’t either.” Then she stopped, but Stacey asked her what she meant.’

  ‘What did she mean?’

  ‘I dunno. I had to go back to work then. But Stacey and Zrinka never seemed to see each other after that.’

  ‘Stacey and Dominic,’ asked the inspector, ‘do you know what happened there in the end?’

  ‘She binned him. Stacey still came into the salon after the thing in Bert’s, not very often, but every time she did I told Mervyn he should be paying me commission. The last time I saw her I asked her about him. She said that Zrinka had been right, and that she’d chucked him.’

  Steele looked at Singh, eyebrows raised slightly.

  ‘What about Zrinka’s folks?’ the big Sikh asked. ‘She seemed to have cut herself off from them, from her father at any rate.’

  ‘No, you’re dead wrong there. Zrinka loved her dad. He understood when she said that she was moving up here to make her name as an artist, where she wouldn’t be connected with him, and where she could be sure that people were buying her stuff because it was good, not because of who she was. Officially she was independent of him and her mum, but she bought her flat, and he slipped her cash every so often: I’m not talking about the odd tenner either. It was funny: neither of them knew the other was helping her. It was supposed to be a secret, but she told me.’ Amy smiled. ‘And then there was her brother.’

  Dražen?’

  ‘Yeah. He calls himself David, though, David Barnes. Now he does have a problem with his old man.’

  ‘You’ve met him?’

  ‘Yeah. He came up here to visit Zrinka once. He took the pair of us out to dinner at Cosmo’s, just along the road from her place. He was really nice, really, really nice.’ For the first time since the detectives had arrived at her Comely Bank studio flat, Amy’s face showed a touch of colour. ‘In fact . . .’ she continued, then stopped. ‘A-Frame doesn’t know about that. Anyway, he and I hadn’t been going out very long then.

  ‘Poor David.’ She sighed. ‘I think that Zrinka was the most important person in his world.’

  Forty

  If he had known that Gregor Broughton lived in Elie, Mario McGuire might have delegated the visit to a junior officer. The Fife coastal village held mixed memories for him; some years before, when he and Maggie Rose had both been junior CID officers, they had been on a stake-out there and had wound up sharing the last hotel room in town. Their lives had been conjoined from that time, as they drifted into an ill-judged and ultimately ill-fated marriage, which had ended in relatively harmonious divorce. Many times he had wondered what would have happened to them both if, that night, there had been one more room at the inn.

  He had avoided the place since then, but by the time the late-duty man in the Crown Office had called him back with Broughton’s home address, there had been little or no option but to go himself. He had called Paula to tell her that he would be late; she had told him cheerfully that she was in the course of reorganising the kitchen, and that he could be as late as he liked.

  The drive from the centre of Edinburgh took almost exactly an hour. As he drove down the broad avenue that led into Elie, his navigation system told him to turn right at the first junction. He followed its orders, noting, as he drove past it, that the big grey-stone hotel in which he and Maggie had got together had closed for business and had been converted into flats. ‘I wonder where the weary travellers lay their heads in Elie now,’ he mused aloud, ‘and randy young coppers get laid?’

  Broughton’s house was a modern structure, half bungalow, half chalet, with a walled garden and a gate that led down to the beach. Forewarned of his visit, the fiscal greeted him warmly: he was pleased to have company, McGuire guessed, since Lady Broughton was on High Court business in Glasgow, and would be staying over.

  ‘Have you eaten, Mar
io?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I came as soon as I had everything put together, the picture, the latest witness statements and the press release.’

  ‘I thought not, so I’ve knocked us up some sandwiches. That okay?’

  ‘Sure, thanks. That’s much appreciated.’

  Broughton led the way through to a garden conservatory: the sun was going down, but McGuire could still make out the grey sea, and the East Lothian coast beyond. Okay, he thought, but not a patch on Loch Tay.

  The two men made small talk as they ate, of rugby, restaurants, wives and partners. They left the business until they had finished. Once they were ready, the detective gave the prosecutor a run-down of the investigation, and of the steps that had led them to Dominic Padstow.

  ‘Is Steele confident about the Noone girl’s memory?’ he asked, as the chief superintendent finished. ‘It’s one thing being sure of yourself in a police interview, but I don’t have to tell you that if she turns out to be a key witness she’ll have to be more than that. The last thing we want is for her to become hesitant and evasive under defence cross-examination. ’

  ‘Stevie’s my best officer,’ McGuire told him, ‘although I won’t appreciate it if you pass that opinion on to anyone else. He’ll have given her a quiet grilling himself, with that very thought in mind; if he’s satisfied, so am I.’

  ‘And you’re satisfied, beyond any doubt, that Dominic Padstow is an alias?’

  ‘We’ve searched every likely database in the UK and we’ve come up with nothing. He doesn’t have a national-insurance number or an NHS number. There is no passport issued under that name.’

  ‘Okay, I get the picture.’

  ‘Good. Now can everyone else get it? Can I phone Alan Royston and let him issue it, and the press release to the media?’

  Broughton picked up the draft release from the table in front of him and read through it. ‘Should be considered dangerous?’ he exclaimed. ‘The public should not approach him? That’s prejudicial. We could get stuffed by the defence on that.’

  ‘They might try it. Now tell me honestly, if they did put up a defence that our warning, given in good faith in the interests of public safety, denied him a fair trial, and your wife was the judge, how far would she chuck it?’

  ‘As far as she could; right out of court for sure. But that doesn’t mean to say another judge would.’

  ‘Name one who’d be likely to. Lord Nelson?’

  ‘No, not even him, I’ll grant you. Okay, you can have it.’

  ‘And the picture?’

  ‘There’s hardly any point to the press release without the likeness, is there?’ He picked it up. ‘You’re calling it an artist’s impression?’

  ‘Absolutely. There couldn’t be a more apt description.’

  ‘I know nothing about painting,’ said Broughton, ‘but this has to be a unique work. It could become priceless. Imagine, an artist using her brush to identify the man who killed her.’

  Forty-one

  ʻJust one more day,’ he said, ‘and Chief Superintendent Margaret Rose becomes Mrs Margaret Steele, full-time. Does the prospect scare you?’ He tipped his glass of red wine in her direction as he sank back into his soft armchair.

  ‘Not a bit,’ she replied, stretched out on the couch with a tumbler of sparkling water resting on her mid-section. ‘I’ve got other things on my mind.’

  Since leaving the hospital, as the fearful reality of her diagnosis had set in, there had been moments when her resolve had weakened, when a voice inside her had said, ‘Go back there, see Fine, tell him to operate, let the baby take her chances in an incubator for a few weeks and give yourself the hope of a cure, of a lifetime with Stevie, and with her if that’s how it works out.’

  She had been tempted, once so strongly that she had been standing at the door, with her car keys in her hand. And then her baby had kicked inside her, and her strength of will had returned.

  She had never seen the child, having refused to look at the ultrasound images of her, and yet in her mind she had a face, not newly born but a couple of years old, with reddish hair like hers, and Stevie’s eyes and smile. She had a name, too, one that Maggie was keeping to herself, for good luck, until after she had given birth.

  But even with her determination renewed in her mind, she had wondered whether she was right to keep her husband in the dark. She was afraid that she was thinking like a senior police officer, keeping him out of the decision-making process because, strictly speaking, he did not need to know. Over supper, delayed until he had come home from work after nine o’clock, she had almost blurted it out. Indeed she would have, had she not realised how tired he looked, and that although his body was with her, his mind was totally preoccupied by his manhunt.

  And so, instead, she had let him eat, and unwind; she had topped up his glass before it was empty, and she had waited until he was hers again. By that time she knew that her weaknesses were selfish, and that she had to keep her secret, if for no other reason than that she would not have been able to bear the look on his face had she revealed it.

  ‘I can see that.’ He grinned at her. ‘I tell you, tomorrow’s been a long time coming for me. I know you delayed your departure to give yourself as much time off as possible after the birth, but I wish you’d gone a month ago. You’ve been growing a child inside you and running a city-centre police division at one and the same time. Even for you, love, that’s a big ask.’

  ‘Well, now you can be happy, okay?’

  ‘Now I can start to be; but just stopping work isn’t going to be enough. I know you: you’ll find substitutes for the office. I’ll come in at night and find that you’ve spent the bloody day at Sainsbury’s in Cameron Toll, or that you’ve been rearranging the furniture, or that you’ve painted the downstairs toilet.’

  He pointed a finger at her. ‘Well, none of that’s going to happen. This is DI Steele, Stevie boy, talking to you, and he’s telling you that, for the first time in your adult life, you are going to have a proper rest for the next eleven weeks, or at least until that wee one decides to put in an appearance.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ she drawled, hiding her astonishment that he seemed to be beating her to the punch. ‘And how’s that going to happen?’

  ‘We’re getting a domestic,’ he announced. ‘Ray Wilding has a cousin. He’s in the navy, and he’s going on a six-month tour of duty in the Indian Ocean. His wife worked on the assembly line in a factory in Livingston until a month ago when she was made redundant. She’s looking for a part-time job, at least for as long as her man’s away, and she doesn’t mind what it is. Where she worked, she was in a sterile area, and Ray says that their house is like that too. He says it’s so clean he feels guilty even having a pee in their toilet. She’s coming to see us on Saturday morning.’

  ‘She is, is she?’

  ‘Yes, and no arguments.’

  Maggie propped herself up on an elbow. ‘DI Steele,’ she said, ‘Stevie boy: my long-term mission in life is to make you happy. If that will do the job, I will see this woman, however grudgingly. If I like her, she’s on, until her sailor gets home from the sea. What’s her name?’

  ‘Margot; Margot Wilding. Mrs Ray says you and she will get on fine.’

  ‘We’ll see. Want another refill?’ She made to get up, but he told her not to be so bloody silly and fetched the bottle himself from the sideboard. ‘Are you ready to talk about it now?’ she asked, as he laid his replenished glass on a side table and slumped back into his chair.

  ‘Just about,’ he answered. ‘What a day we’ve had. That man Boras! The word “sinister” could have been invented for him. No wonder Brian Mackie arm-twisted the fiscal to release his daughter’s body so we could get him out of town. Trouble comes off the man in waves, and with that fucking city slicker of a PR man behind him, there’s no telling what bother he might have caused in the media.’

  ‘A million, eh? I’ll bet your phones were busy.’

  ‘Oh, they were, but it could have been wo
rse. At least big Tarvil got a laugh out of it. He had a call from a psychic in London who claimed that she’d induced a vision by placing her hands on the telly during the press conference. She told him that we were looking for a criminal so clever, so devious and so influential that she makes Jack the Ripper seem like a shoplifter.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘That was what was wrong with her picture. We’re looking for a man. When Tarvil told her that, she said that sometimes the visions aren’t entirely clear and could he put her name in for the reward anyway?’

  Maggie was surprised to find that she was still capable of spontaneous laughter. ‘Priceless,’ she chortled. ‘Did he ask her whether she reads crime books or writes them?’

  ‘No, he hung up. She won’t be in the big prize draw. Nor will anyone else the way it’s looking: we have a suspect.’

  ‘I know, Brian Mackie told me. That’s great.’

  ‘It is and it isn’t,’ said Stevie, hesitantly. ‘We’ve made a lot of progress today, but we’re still short of a clear-up. Thanks to a nice girl called Amy, we know for sure that the two female victims were acquainted. More than that, we know that they had a boyfriend in common, a man who lived with Zrinka in Edinburgh for a while, and then after she broke up with him, moved on to Stacey Gavin, until she also showed him the way down the road. That’s where we’re focused: on him.’

  ‘Well? That is great, isn’t it?’

  ‘On the surface, it seems that way. It’s not what I expected, that’s all. I was sure we really did have a serial murderer on our hands. That’s why I feel just a bit uncomfortable. Still, my discomfort may well be irrelevant. So, the killer seems to have had a thing about art, and about female artists. So what? I’m forced to ask myself. The shootings, those of the women that is, look ritualistic, and maybe they were.

  ‘Yet that doesn’t mean to say that there wasn’t a very simple motive behind them, one of the oldest in the book, namely, the hellacious fury of a cast-off lover. Both women had affairs with this man, both dumped him. The likeliest scenario facing us at this moment, indeed the only scenario, is that he took his revenge by stalking them and killing them, with Harry Paul, Zrinka’s new man, thrown in as a bonus.’