Past lying, p.16
Past Lying, page 16
‘Poor lassie hasn’t got much in the way of hidden depths.’
‘He deserves better.’
‘Aye, but he’s got to work that out for himself.’
‘This might be the perfect time. I gather you’re going to meet him?’
Karen came back into the room and opened the drinks cabinet. ‘With a wee bit of Scotch courage.’ Gin was her spirit of choice, but not something she could drink neat. She took out one of Hamish’s hip flasks and filled it with a Speyside single malt – what he would call a ‘morning whisky’. Nothing too challenging for her or for Jason, but a good quality dram that would slip down easily. ‘He needs to feel he’s not facing this without support. Can you call Eilidh and let her know he’s OK and on his way home?’
Daisy groaned. ‘I get all the good jobs. Sure, I’ll do that.’
As she descended the stairs to the street, Karen remembered she was supposed to make a phone call at nine. Would this day never end? As she walked, she speed-dialled her home number. For the second time, she feared she was about to reach voicemail, but then she heard Rafiq’s voice. ‘Hello?’ Tentative, for obvious reasons.
‘Hi, Rafiq. It’s me, Karen. Is everything OK with you?’
‘Better than OK. I thank you very much for this. Your flat is very comfortable and you are very generous.’
‘You figured out how things work? The TV, the cooker?’
‘It’s good. I have used your shower and I feel really clean for the first time in a long time.’ He chuckled. ‘Your boyfriend is indeed much bigger than me, but it feels good to wear something fresh. And to eat proper food. You have saved my life. I do not understand why, but I am grateful.’
The warmth in his voice was embarrassing her. ‘I’m happy to help. But we need to sort you out some clothes that fit better. I can meet you tomorrow evening at the breakwater and we can order some online.’
‘I cannot pay for this,’ he said. ‘Perhaps Miran can lend me some?’
‘Don’t worry about that just now.’ Karen did the time sums in her head. ‘Meet me opposite the main entrance to the block, by the sea. Half past ten?’
‘I will. Thank you. A million times.’
As she ended the call, she turned into the bottom of Gayfield Square. Jason was already hunched on one of the benches. As Karen approached, he shifted along to the far end. He greeted her with a small nod. She could see well enough under the street lights to notice his eyes were red and swollen.
‘I’m truly sorry about your mum, Jason.’
He nodded again. ‘She really likes you, boss.’
‘Do you know how she got it?’
He shrugged. ‘Must have been at her work. You know she’s working in a care home now, three days a week?’
Karen took out the hip flask and a packet of disinfectant wipes. She cleaned the outside of the flask and the little cap that doubled as a cup. She poured some whisky into the cup then passed the flask to Jason. ‘Help yourself, I’ve got plenty here,’ she said.
He looked on the verge of tears again. ‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’ Nevertheless, he accepted the flask and took a deep swig. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, ‘Good stuff.’
‘Hamish,’ she said.
‘Aye, well. You’re a gin drinker, you’d know no different.’ He managed a crooked smile.
‘Any news?’
Jason shook his head. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ He turned away.
‘Oh my God, Jason.’ She couldn’t help herself. ‘You’ve got cornrows up the back of your head.’ She stifled a laugh.
He swiftly swivelled back to face her. ‘I know. Does it look as stupid as it feels?’
‘I don’t know. Is it possible to feel that stupid?’ They grinned at each other, a beautiful moment of escape from anxiety.
They finished the whisky in silence. ‘Let’s get away down the hill,’ Karen said. As they stood, Karen put a hand on his arm. ‘I’ve got your back, Jason. Any time you need to let off steam, I’m here.’
‘Thanks, boss. That means a lot.’
‘Just don’t tell anybody, right?’
‘Your secret’s safe with me.’
They set off, Karen asking Jason for more details about the calls he’d been making. Work, the balm for all miseries. For a lot of people, its absence was going to be the hardest part of lockdown. For the briefest of moments, she felt lucky.
17
Karen was half an hour early for her meeting with Rosalind Harris. She liked to stake out the turf before she met people outside her usual stamping grounds. She knew the Meadows well enough, but the area had been in constant flux since the development of the former Victorian Royal Infirmary had been underway. Quartermile, so called because the site was quarter of a mile from the iconic castle and Royal Mile and also, by happy chance, measured quarter of a mile from corner to corner.
Some of the original buildings remained, transformed into luxury flats and offices; others had disappeared, replaced by geometric blocks of glass and steel containing glamorous flats with stunning views of the city and beyond. Karen had heard that dozens of the flats had been bought by foreign investors who had never set foot in the place. Certainly, on occasions when she’d walked through the Meadows late in the evening more windows had been unlit than illuminated. She wondered how many of the apartments were actually occupied in lockdown.
Karen walked along Simpsons Loan, figuring out which block held Rosalind Harris’s flat. To get to their rendezvous point, Rosalind would have to leave the block and turn right towards Middle Meadow Walk. There was a short lane opposite the entrance to her block, with a walled-off bed containing young trees and plants. Karen perched on the low surround and took out her phone. Anybody looking would see a woman in a warm winter coat and a woolly hat checking her messages. Karen expected to see nothing except Rosalind Harris – available from several angles on Google Images – and that was fine. But it never hurt to cover all the bases.
Five minutes later, she was glad she’d done just that. The door opened and two people stepped out into the chill morning. Rosalind Harris emerged first, the door held open by a man. She turned towards him, obscuring Karen’s view of his face. He bent down to kiss her then they turned in opposite directions. She caught a quick glimpse of the man as he turned away, for all the use it was; he was wearing a brown tweed butcher’s boy cap that obscured the top part of his face and the bottom half was covered by a dark beard. He was dressed for the weather in a grey tweed overcoat that came to his knees.
Still, Karen mused as she hastened to follow Rosalind, it had been long enough since her divorce and the death of her ex-husband. Nobody could blame her for moving on. She’d eventually managed to do the same after Phil’s death, and he’d never publicly humiliated her.
She’d almost caught up with Rosalind by the time she reached the wide path that led down to the Meadows. Her quarry stopped by the side of the path, scanning in both directions. Karen came to a halt the prescribed two metres distant, smiled and raised a hand. ‘Ms Harris?’ she ventured. Lawyers liked a bit of formality till they decided otherwise, in her experience. ‘I’m DCI Pirie.’
Rosalind tipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘Shall we walk?’ She indicated the direction and they set off. ‘There are some benches on Jawbone Walk,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit early for the student population to be taking their exercise, so we should be lucky and get one to ourselves.’
Karen kept pace with her as they veered right on to the tree-lined path. Before long, they found an empty bench and sat at opposite ends, half-turned towards each other. It was her first chance to study Rosalind. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, Karen thought. But hers was a face you’d look at twice. And it matched the description in the manuscript. Glossy dark hair held back by a wide barrette framed a broad forehead with well-groomed eyebrows over hazel eyes. Her nose was short and pert, her mouth wide and full, bracketed with creases that promised smiles. She wasn’t smiling now, though. She was gazing directly at Karen, who felt she was definitely losing by comparison. ‘Now perhaps you can explain why you need to talk to me?’ Rosalind asked, raising her eyebrows in a question that revealed faint lines across her forehead.
Karen gave a rueful smile. ‘I’m not sure I can manage that in a way that doesn’t sound almost random. But I’ll try. You may remember the case of Lara Hardie? A student who went missing without a trace around a year ago?’
Rosalind frowned. ‘It rings a vague bell. She went out one evening and never came back? Is that the one?’
‘That’s the one. Disappeared into thin air. My job is running the Historic Cases Unit, so whenever we get fresh evidence with something like this, it falls into my team’s remit. Now something’s turned up that we feel is worth looking into. But it’s very circumstantial.’
‘All very interesting, but what has it to do with me?’
‘Can I ask you about your ex-husband’s archive?’
‘Jake’s archive? What on earth has that to do with a missing student?’
Karen gave a one-shouldered shrug. ‘Probably nothing. But there’s some details that niggle. I don’t know about you, but whenever I find something that feels . . . I don’t know how to put it. Out of kilter? Weird? I have to chase it down. I’m sure you have moments like that in your line of work?’
Rosalind nodded, but her face expressed doubt. ‘It happens. Mostly it turns out to be nothing. A clerical error or a misunderstanding. But yes, I know what you mean.’
‘The archivist at the National Library found something in Jake Stein’s archive that set her wondering.’
Rosalind sighed. ‘I’m sure there’s plenty in there to set a librarian’s mind wondering. My ex was not always a very nice man. What in particular are you referring to?’
‘There was an unfinished manuscript in one of the boxes—’
‘Let me stop you there, Chief Inspector. There were half a dozen partial manuscripts in the archive. Books he’d started that fizzled out when he realised the plot made no sense, or it was going nowhere, or he hated the characters too much to want to spend more time with them.’
All of which matched Karen’s question marks about this particular manuscript. ‘I’ll have to take your word for that, I haven’t been in the archive myself yet. The one I’m interested in is called The Vanishing of Laurel Oliver.’ She let that hang in the air.
Rosalind shook her head. ‘It doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid. To be perfectly honest, it really doesn’t sound like one of my ex’s titles. He tended to go for more dramatic ones. Steal the Dead, that sort of thing.’
‘It’s about two writers who play chess together. One of them has a fall from grace. The other’s career is on the up. The loser finds out his wife is having an affair with the other man. He decides to set his opponent up by framing him for murder.’ Karen’s expression asked the question her words hadn’t.
Rosalind’s face was blank. Neither bewildered nor taken aback. For Karen, that was as much a tell as a gasp of surprise.
‘Do you remember coming across it?’
‘No. But honestly, I didn’t pay much attention to the fiction in the archive. What interest I had was in the letters and the diaries. And even then . . . well, there’s a limit to how much humiliation most of us can take.’ Her voice was more clipped now. Karen couldn’t decide whether she was hiding something or simply uncomfortable with the memory of what Jake Stein had been truly like.
‘But your husband was a chess player, wasn’t he?’
‘My ex-husband did play chess, yes. Frankly, I imagine that’s why he chose it as a proxy conflict for the two writers. Jake would have been writing from a place of knowledge. No research required.’
‘Who did he play against? Did he have a regular opponent?’
She gave a merry little laugh. ‘Chief Inspector, don’t make the mistake of conflating the fiction with the reality. Even in a roman-à-clef. The character in the manuscript may have borne some superficial similarities to my ex, but there’s no actual congruence. You can’t map a character directly on to its creator. Nor the actual people in their lives. Trust me, I don’t resemble any of the female characters in Jake’s books.’
She had a point, Karen knew. Nevertheless, when a witness used words like ‘honestly’ and ‘actual’ and ‘frankly’ as often as Rosalind was doing, Karen always heard the faint ringing of a bell that tolled the opposite message. ‘You didn’t answer my question. Did he have a regular opponent?’
She shook her head. ‘I really couldn’t say. Latterly, we led quite separate lives. He had his friends, I had mine. He was often on the road, promoting his books. I don’t have much idea how he spent his time away from home, though I had always presumed it involved less cerebral pursuits than chess. Look, where are we going with this? What’s the point of these questions?’ She shifted, as if on the point of going.
‘The point of these questions is that a young woman is missing. Based on my experience of these things, presumed dead. Based on my experience of these things, when a young woman with no history of mental health problems, with an active social life and perfectly adequate academic results – when a lassie like that ends up on the missing list, the chances are that somewhere along the way she crossed paths with someone, probably a man, who meant her serious harm.’ Karen deliberately sharpened her voice and raised her chin. ‘So when we find the slimmest evidential connection, we follow where it leads us.’
Rosalind’s cheeks pinked up. ‘Of course. Forgive me. I thought when they buried my ex, that I could finally close the door on him.’
Karen held her gaze. ‘Does the name Ross McEwen mean anything to you?’
A couple of rapid blinks. ‘He’s another Scottish crime writer. I’ve met him a few times. Awards ceremonies, Edinburgh Book Festival parties.’
‘Did you know he played chess with Jake?’
Her eyes widened. ‘I don’t remember either of them mentioning it. To be honest, my brain tended to glaze over at those dos.’
She was lying, Karen thought. The question was why. ‘Fair enough. By the way, I’m curious as to how you ended up in charge of your late ex-husband’s archive.’ She let the comment hang.
Rosalind gave a wry smile. ‘Like many of us, Chief Inspector, Jake thought he would live forever. He never got round to sorting out his testatory affairs after the divorce. He probably thought there was no hurry. His will made me his literary executor, and he never got round to changing it. In fact, I inherited his copyrights and what little else he had too.’
‘I wondered. Thanks for clearing that up. I’ve only got a couple more questions, then we’re done. Did Jake have a place where he went to write? A cabin, or a wee bothy somewhere?’
She shook her head. ‘No. He wrote at home. Or when he was on the road, he’d write in cafés. He liked people-watching and eavesdropping, he said it often gave him little tics and behaviours he could transplant on to his characters.’
‘So he never borrowed anywhere from a colleague, to get away from it all and write? Maybe when he had a deadline?’
‘No, never.’
‘Not even one of the writers he’d helped in their early days?’
Rosalind raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Really, no. He didn’t much like the countryside, to be honest. He preferred the buzz of city life.’ She gathered her coat around her. This time she really was about to leave.
‘You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of your ex. Tell me, do you think he would have been capable of murder?’ It wasn’t the sort of question Karen would normally pose. But she wanted Rosalind Harris rattled.
She stood up, her expression imperious. ‘Jake was many things. Some of them frankly repulsive. But he was never violent towards me.’
‘Push anyone hard enough, and they’ll respond in ways we don’t recognise,’ Karen said mildly.
‘Trust me, I pushed him hard on occasion and he never raised a hand to me. Why on earth would he murder a young woman?’ Now she’d found the outrage button.
Karen stood up. ‘Maybe to prove he could?’
Rosalind scoffed. ‘Are you the best that Police Scotland can do? If so, God help us all.’ She turned on her heel and marched off up the Jawbone Walk.
Karen sat down again and watched her go. She wondered exactly how many lies Rosalind Harris had told her. And more importantly, why.
18
Jason awoke to the sound of his phone. He scrabbled for it, almost falling on the floor, remembering as he grabbed it that he was on the sofa. Not because Eilidh had banished him, but because he couldn’t sleep and didn’t want her to suffer the same fate. He registered Ronan’s name and stabbed the phone with his finger then jammed it to his ear. ‘What’s the news?’ he demanded before his brother could speak.
‘It’s not good,’ Ronan said. ‘They let me talk to her for a wee minute on the phone but she could hardly say my name. She’s still on the oxygen but they say she’s not responding as well as they’d like.’
‘So what does that even mean? She’s responding a bit? She’s not getting any better?’ He squinched around and sat up, staring at the room without seeing anything. ‘How can they not talk plain English? Like, on a scale of one to ten, how bad is it?
‘They never tell you anything. That way you cannae kick off if it all goes to shit. All I know is she didn’t sound like herself.’
‘It’s driving me mad, being stuck here and not able to see her.’
‘I don’t know, I think it’s worse, being this close but still not able to sit with her and hold her hand.’ He took a ragged breath. ‘Jase, they’re talking about maybe putting her on a ventilator if she doesn’t start to improve.’
