Singing to the Dead

by Caro Ramsay

  Munro smiled as he caught Mulholland looking. ‘That’s my mother. And that’s her father – my McDougall grandfather – up there. The family have a long legal tradition.’ He clasped his fingers together, leaned forward and said, ‘Right, how can I help you? Something about my credit card?’

  ‘The platinum one, MasterCard.’ Mulholland reeled off the number from memory, visibly impressing Douglas Munro. ‘Do you still have it in your possession?’

  ‘Hold on a mo.’ Munro eased himself from his chair, took out his wallet, had a quick look and pulled a face. ‘Yes, it’s in my wallet.’

  ‘You haven’t noticed it missing?’

  ‘Can’t say I have. I don’t use it often but it’s always in my wallet, and I don’t leave it anywhere. Why?’

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Stella, come in. Of course, you have all met, haven’t you,’ he said.

  Stella nodded as she laid a tray on the desk, with a silver coffee pot, two china cups and saucers, and small biscuits perfectly arranged on a doily. From the tray she lifted an envelope and handed it to Douglas. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to Costello, ‘but do you have any news yet?’

  ‘Nothing, but we are working on a few leads.’

  Stella shot her a look that suggested they should be out looking rather than sitting in this office. ‘Douglas, the police have actually just phoned, looking for the keys to three properties; the two on Rowanhill Road and the one on Crown Avenue. Shall I go down with them?’

  ‘Just routine, sir,’ Mulholland reassured him. ‘The search teams will be going through the whole area.’

  ‘Fine, fine. You never think of these things, do you?’ He nodded. ‘Of course, Stella. Get a taxi if you want. It’s only Eve who’s coming in, so I can lock up here. But can you help these officers with something else before you go? It’s about my credit card.’ He showed her the credit card then slit open the envelope with a fine knife.

  ‘Miss McCorkindale, have you ever seen anything on Mr Munro’s statements that you can’t explain?’

  Stella shrugged. ‘No. But the next statement will be in any day now – you know what the post is like this time of year. I can fetch the most recent for you.’

  ‘Please do. Does anyone else have access to your card, Mr Munro, apart from Miss McCorkindale?’ asked Costello brusquely, tiring of the charade. Children were missing, the search sounded as though it was stepping up, and they might need all the ground troops they could muster.

  ‘Nobody else. It’s not a joint card.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  Stella glanced at Douglas, who was taking a glass of water from the tray, popping a capsule from its tinfoil with a well-practised thumb.

  ‘Does anybody else have use of this credit card?’

  Douglas swallowed hard. ‘Only Stella. May I ask what the purchase was? There’s obviously something on my card you are concerned about.’

  ‘Just part of an ongoing enquiry,’ said Mulholland.

  ‘I was a lawyer; my discretion is assured,’ said Munro. Costello noticed that Stella had silently left the room. But she hadn’t seen her go.

  ‘There was a purchase made from a firm of chemical suppliers in the USA.’

  ‘Really?’ Munro raised his eyebrow, as if that had interested him. ‘And I take it you can’t tell me exactly what?’

  ‘We might have a problem with malicious product tampering, cyanide probably. The cyanide seems to have been purchased on your card.’ Costello watched Munro’s face; his amazement seemed genuine.

  ‘Is that what the product recall in the papers was all about? A painkiller, isn’t it?’ Munro emptied the contents of his cup down his throat. ‘Well, it’s obviously very serious but I don’t think I can help you any further.’

  ‘You can phone the credit card company in our presence and let us hear your recent purchases.’ Costello nodded at the phone. ‘You can get sight of a current statement on the computer while you’re at it. It would help us know whether it’s fraud or something else.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Now,’ smiled Costello.

  Five minutes later they knew.

  ‘That’s the only one I don’t recognize.’ Douglas Munro’s hand was trembling as he touched the screen, indicating an innocuous line of typing in a long list of items. ‘You want a printout of that, I assume.’

  ‘Thank you. We’ll take it from here.’ Costello got up to go, noticing a Squidgy McMidge paperweight on the table, his purple head on a spring so it would bounce. She remembered Peter having one and couldn’t resist giving it a small pat for luck. She shivered, then pulled herself together. ‘Squidgy did them a fair turn at the Rowanhill School do yesterday,’ she beamed at Munro. ‘Were you there?’

  ‘Yes. No.’ He seemed uncertain. He smiled briefly at Costello, suddenly slightly wary as he realized he was now talking to the organ grinder, not the monkey. His eyes flitted from the midge back to her face. ‘I mean, yes, I heard he did us all proud, and no, I didn’t make it along there myself. We’re all big Squidgy fans in this office. Evelynne Calloway’s a very talented young lady.’ Munro tipped up the little purple face of the midge, and the head tick-tocked on the spring. ‘He’s so much more than a cartoon. He’s an absolute gold mine.’

  ‘Isn’t he just?’ said a female voice from the waiting room. It was the auburn-haired woman in the wheel-chair Costello had seen briefly at the fair. The tartan rug round her legs was scattered with flecks of snow, which had not yet had time to melt.

  ‘Hello, Miss Calloway, we were just talking about your sister,’ said Douglas.

  ‘So, you were talking about me, Mr Munro?’ Eve Calloway said, knocking the snow from her rug on to the deep-pile carpet as she watched the couple walk to the lift door – well, not a couple really, she thought. The girl was dressed rather formally. So was the guy. She had seen them before; he was the cop at the fair with the hippie chick. Police. Of course. She even fancied she could see a thin film of sweat on Munro’s top lip. He ignored her as he walked past, fishing a bubble pack of Headeze from his pocket. He pursed his lips when he realized it was already empty, and threw it into the nearest waste-paper basket.

  Stella busied herself in the reception area, getting tagged keys from a locked cupboard, then moving one of the chairs in the waiting room so that Eve’s wheelchair could fit neatly into the corner. Eve knew the secretary was wary of her; she had been since Eve was a wee girl chanting rude rhymes at her from her garden gate. Stella McCorkindale had the type of face that terrified children, with bulbous eyes behind glasses that kept sliding down her nose. When Eve was young, Stella had had a goitre, which Eve had fantasized was a small baby Stella had eaten that had got stuck in her throat.

  But now Stella was a master at throwing Eve looks of distaste, the vague implication being that her employer had better things to do than sort out two dysfunctional sisters and a demanding midge.

  ‘I’ll be with you in a minute, Eve,’ said Douglas.

  She smirked, rippling her fingertips on the arm of her wheelchair. She could wait. She’d waited a long time to have this conversation with Douglas Reginald Munro. She’d started researching him the minute Douglas came sniffing after Lynne. The only person she could not track down was a wife; there were lots of girlfriends, and a mother, but no wife. Douglas made his money by conning stupid women out of their houses. Stupid women like Lynne – he was the ‘single lady with property and no brains’ specialist. Lynne had no property and no brains so she half qualified. She could have found out all about Munro if she hadn’t been so besotted, but love is blind – deaf, in Lynne’s case – and she would not listen. Which was why Eve was here, to give Munro one chance to redeem himself. If he left Lynne alone, she would sign. If not, she wouldn’t. She didn’t add that he would then be lucky to see the New Year in. She imagined the majestic stag in her sights, the cross hairs between its beautiful brown eyes, as she gently squeezed the trigger. She started to smile at her own cleverness but di
sguised it as a coughing fit, all the time watching the body language of the man. Was he nervous? Scared? Did he know?

  Eve pretended she was adjusting her cushion, still observing Douglas as he stood in his office, quietly talking on the phone, jangling the keys in his trouser pocket. Private school, old money, his family had business ties that went back generations. She looked at the portraits round the waiting area; all that acumen and education – to come down to a bloody piranha like this.

  Douglas turned, hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. ‘You had better go, Stella. Take the keys and get a receipt. I’ll lock up here. Do you mind, Eve? I’ll be another few minutes here.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Eve. ‘I’m not exactly going to stand up and jump the queue, am I? My legs don’t work,’ she explained to Stella.

  She smiled a sardonic smile. ‘So I see.’

  ‘Thanks, Eve; I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Douglas said, closing the door with his foot.

  ‘He’s got one of his headaches again, hasn’t he? I keep telling him he should wear his specs or get his eyeballs lasered or something. But men never listen, do they? Vanity thy name is man!’

  Stella just smiled vaguely, and fiddled with the buttons on the phone, as if unwilling to get involved.

  ‘Is that Douglas’s mum? That portrait?’ Eve carried on blithely. ‘You can see the family likeness, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes. She’s a lawyer too, still does a little legal work even now. Douglas does the property development. I quite enjoy it.’ Stella gathered some files, tying them with a ribbon. She was getting ready to go.

  Eve sat still, noticing Douglas’s jacket hanging on the coat stand. ‘Stella, can I ask you something?’

  ‘I’ll certainly try to help you, but it might be better if you asked Mr Munro.’

  ‘No, it’s nothing like that. I just always wonder… actually, to be honest, I panic… about fire exits. Since my accident, if I get into a lift, I immediately start to worry about how to get out. So, how do I get out of here – if the place goes up in flames?’

  Stella looked round her, thinking. ‘Well, we’re supposed to use the stairs. But as you can’t…’

  ‘… walk…’

  ‘… then Mr Munro would have to carry you.’

  ‘Oh, dear. One of these days it’ll happen and I’ll regret all the chocolate I eat.’ Eve patted her huge stomach. And she laughed the little laugh she knew made her look very pretty. ‘Douglas wouldn’t let me roast to death, would he? He’s a nice man, in spite of being a lawyer.’

  ‘That reminds me…’ Stella swung her coat round her shoulders. ‘I was going to put this through your door.’ She handed Eve an envelope addressed to Lynne Calloway. ‘It’s the valuation Douglas did for your house.’

  Have I really just had it valued? ‘Always better to know where you stand with these things,’ said Eve, marvelling at her own acting ability.

  Stella slung her handbag over her shoulder. ‘Did your sister get her little mystery solved last night? She was expecting a visitor and thought she’d missed them. The only people I ever see are the two of you and the old lady with the grey hair – a friend of yours? She has terrible trouble with your front step.’

  ‘Margaret?’ said Eve. ‘She’s an old friend of Mum’s. But the trouble is, she and Lynne can’t stand each other. So, she always comes when Lynne is out.’

  ‘And does she stay the night to help look after you?’

  ‘I do need some help sometimes, and I can’t always rely on Lynne,’ Eve said pathetically, looking at the walls. ‘Yes, sometimes I need all the help I can get.’ She rubbed her leg pathetically, then tucked her blanket round her. ‘Is Douglas’s wife feeling better? I heard she was poorly.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Stella curtly, not looking at her.

  ‘You’d better go, in case the boss comes out and finds us jabbering.’

  ‘Cheerio.’

  ‘Bye then,’ said Eve, alone at last.

  23

  Quinn sat behind her desk and looked out over the empty office. Everybody was somewhere else, doing something that probably was going nowhere. She sighed. She felt sick – for the first time in her career she didn’t have a clue what to do next. She had put a quiet unofficial trail on anybody in Rogan’s entourage who left the hotel for any reason. Littlewood would debrief Costello about Lauren. He had ideas; no evidence but at least he had ideas. The house-to-house was up and running again, properly this time, but there was nothing coming in. Alison McEwen was a waste of space, but well known. Lorraine Scott had had to be sedated when she was told about Luca. But she was a ‘well kennt face’ also. Or was the eyewitness mistaken? It wouldn’t be the first time, and it would mean they were back to thinking about a single perp. Yet nothing had come down the wire, not a whisper, not a sniff.

  Brenda’s appeal had been emotional, but she was a crabbit-looking woman. The evening news report brought in a whole load of phone calls, mostly from people they had already checked. Miss Cotter and Miss McCorkindale were two names the computer threw at them all the time. But Quinn was too tired to see a connection, apart from all the legitimate connections people who live so close would have. Although part of Glasgow, Partickhill was its own little village, so the same characters popped up again and again. What might seem like coincidence was actually perfectly logical.

  Through the glass, she saw the door to the Incident Room open, and Anderson came in. He looked awful; he had aged years. Burns followed him in and took two plastic cups of water from the machine. They stood looking at the wall charts, the search results, the side wall map of the USA. She knew Colin’s eyes would constantly come back to the picture of a happy smiling Peter, his arms round the mouldy feathers of Pat the Penguin.

  In the short term, Granny had come over and had taken Brenda home, and Graham Smeaton’s mother had offered to drop Claire off at the Anderson house. Three generations of women, waiting for two generations of men to come home. But Brenda’s removal had made Colin calmer and, for the moment, that was all Quinn could wish for.

  Maybe Batten would come up with something. She certainly hoped so, as she had run out of ideas. She watched Anderson turn to look directly over her head and out the window behind her. He closed his eyes slowly, and then opened them again. He had been looking over the skyline of the city, thinking exactly what she had been thinking – that Peter was out there somewhere.

  They walked down Gordon Street and up into the Sauchiehall Street precinct, Lewis striding out, Costello with her hands buried in her jacket pockets, deep in her own thoughts. She was trying to retain every word of her conversation with Lauren. She’d wanted Littlewood to debrief her asap, yet here she was tracing the cyanide, first with bloody Mulholland, now with bloody Lewis. Mulholland had disappeared off back to the station, no doubt to see if the gorgeous Fran had dragged herself from her bed yet. Costello had had to suffer the intimate details of Lewis and her boyfriend’s early morning shagfest on her own. She halted mid-step as Lewis swerved to look at the window of Watt Brothers.

  ‘Those are nice shoes, aren’t they?’ said Lewis.

  ‘I think we should get on with our job.’

  ‘Two minutes to try on those shoes won’t do any harm.’

  ‘Turning up on a date with the wrong shoes won’t do any harm, but getting on with our job might do Peter Anderson some good. Just a thought.’

  But Lewis would not be shifted. ‘I have a blue D&G dress – would they go with that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know your blue dress and I really couldn’t care less. I think we should get round to Bijou Bytes – the internet café where they do nice chocolate croissants, remember? Where they get deliveries of cyanide?’

  ‘Do you think they’ll give us something to eat?’

  ‘I was rather hoping for the name of the person who asked for the cyanide to be delivered there.’

  ‘Not a chance. Too bloody clever, this guy. But we might manage to get an E-fit out of them. No wonder you’re on yo
ur own, Costello. You’re too focused on your job. You really are quite boring. You have all the sex appeal of a road accident. Do you know, you have the same first name as my spinster great-aunt?’ she said tauntingly.

  ‘Was she called “Sergeant” as well? If my name ever passes your lips again, you’re dead meat.’ Costello quickened her step, enjoying Lewis’s struggle to keep up.

  ‘You’re so funny,’ squealed Lewis.

  Costello stopped and turned, blocking Lewis’s path. She looked up into the face of the taller woman. ‘I’m as funny as a Rottweiler with piles, and don’t forget it,’ she hissed.

  Lewis took a step back, noting the sound of real menace.

  Costello slowly turned round and walked on in quiet fury. It was midday but the shadow of night was still hanging over the city. It was cold, wet, and the snow had soaked through her shoes. But she had a full stomach and a home to go to. She thought of Troy, walking back through the light snow… and Luca and Peter. She was glad when the Christmas lights of Sauchiehall Street started to twinkle in her view, some sign of goodwill to all men.

  Bijou Bytes’ shopfront was constantly open to serve straight on to the street, and the queue for hot coffee was strung out, as tired folk struggled with the last of their Christmas shopping.

  It was much warmer in the shop itself. Bijou Bytes made all their own bread and the sweet smell of dough and yeast hung heavily, clogging the air.