Past lying, p.38
Past Lying, page 38
‘Better get going. Ms Considine’s clock’s running,’ Karen said cheerily, leading the way down the hall.
48
Karen shut the door on Rosalind Harris and her lawyer. They were entitled to private conference and Karen was doing this by the book. She crossed the corridor to the other interview room, tapped on the door and stuck her head round. Ross McEwen sat on one side of the table, what she could see of his face stony. Daisy sat opposite, arms folded, file in front of her. Eyes unreadable. In the corner stood a uniformed PC.
Daisy looked around. ‘Mr McEwen’s lawyer hasn’t arrived yet.’
‘There’s no hurry. Can I borrow you, Sergeant?’
‘How long is this going to take?’ McEwen demanded. ‘I don’t even know why I’m here. A body in my garage with no connection to me, and you’re accusing me of murder?’
‘Let’s have this conversation when your lawyer’s in the room,’ Karen said, as Daisy stood up and followed her out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her. ‘How’s he handling it?’
‘He’s bloody furious but he’s keeping the lid on it. I think he thinks we’ve got nothing on him.’
Karen’s expression was grim. ‘We’ll see about that.’ Her phone beeped with a message. River.
Hyoid broken.
She knew what that meant. The small wishbone-shaped bone, protected by the structures of the throat. A bone that could only reasonably be broken if the throat was crushed. It was the de facto marker of strangulation. Karen showed the message to Daisy.
‘So it’s murder, then.’
Karen nodded. ‘Come with me, let’s see where we can get with Rosalind.’
Rosalind leaned forward, forearms resting on the tabletop. She was clearly wound tight. Her lawyer, Mary Considine, had recently started wearing glasses, and the oversized black frames had turned her from a jolly round-faced Irishwoman into a darkly scary creature, especially with the black mask she’d opted for. Karen hadn’t dealt directly with her previously; her clients tended to be at the high end of the social scale. Legal Aid didn’t come near her hourly rate.
Daisy sorted out the recording equipment and Karen reminded Rosalind that this was an interview under caution. ‘When I first interviewed you in connection with the disappearance of Lara Hardie, you lied to me about your relationship with Ross McEwen. Why did you do that?’
Rosalind looked to Considine, who nodded encouragement. ‘No comment.’
‘When did you and Ross McEwen become lovers?’
‘No comment.’
It was going to be a long night. Made all the more difficult by the wearing of masks, guarding at least half the facial expressions. ‘When did your husband discover your affair?’
A flicker in the eyes. ‘No comment.’
‘When did you and Ross McEwen decide to murder Lara Hardie?’ Considine opened her mouth to protest but Karen talked through her. ‘I’ll rephrase that. When did you and your lover decide to frame your ex-husband for murder?’
This time, the ‘No comment’ was definitely shoogly.
Karen sighed. ‘Rosalind, you’re not helping yourself here. As things stand, you look like an equal partner in a criminal conspiracy to abduct and murder Lara Hardie and dump her body in your lover’s garage. This is your only chance to escape those charges. If you had nothing to do with it, you need to tell me what you knew and when you knew it.’
Considine leaned in and whispered something in Rosalind’s ear. She shook her head.
Karen continued. ‘You need to protect yourself. Ross is going to jail for a very long time and unless your version of events gets you off the hook, so are you. Goodbye liberty, goodbye legal career, goodbye lovely Quartermile apartment and goodbye friends.’
‘That’s enough,’ Considine said. ‘Let’s have some questions rather than threats.’
‘That wasn’t a threat. It was an offer. And it’s an offer that won’t be repeated. Ros, we think that Jake was wearing you down. He still treated you like a possession and he wasn’t a man who would back off. But Ross thinks like a chess player. The only way to defeat your opponent is to take them off the board. Murdering Jake was a non-starter because the pair of you would have a solid gold motive. But Ross has a devious mind. You only have to read his books to know that. He thought it would be much smarter, much more effective, to send Jake to jail for life.’ Karen scoffed. ‘From what I’ve seen of him, it’s an idea that would have made him positively gleeful.’
‘No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ Rosalind blurted out, then covered her mouth with her hand. ‘I mean, no comment.’
Karen let the pause spool out. ‘He thought he could commit the perfect murder. Perfect because it would make your husband the fall guy. You’d be rid of him for good. Only Lara Hardie would pay the price and really, she didn’t count, did she? She was just a nobody, a wannabe, the perfect victim. Poor Lara Hardie, whose only crime was to write the short story Ross McEwen stole.’ A flash of shock in Rosalind’s eyes. ‘Did you not know about that? It wasn’t Ross who wrote that clever, tender “Memorial Garden”. It was Lara Hardie. He passed it off as his own.’ A pause. ‘I’m going to ask you again. When did he draw you in to this conspiracy?’
‘No comment.’ Rosalind couldn’t meet her eyes now. Her hands were tight fists clenched on the tabletop.
‘It wasn’t enough that he dragged you into this. He had to draw your friend Olga Kotova into his mess too. How do you think she’ll feel when the forensics team rip her caravan to the bare bones looking for traces of Lara Hardie’s murder?’
Her head came up and her face was a mask of horror. ‘Olga? What do you mean, Olga?’
‘We believe that’s where he lured Lara. Using the key she’d entrusted to you. It loosely resembles the account in the manuscript.’
‘You’ve got this all wrong,’ she said. Considine put a hand on her arm and she shook it off. ‘Ross didn’t kill Lara Hardie. Jake did.’
‘When did you realise that, Ros?’
‘Ros, I must advise you—’ Considine didn’t stand a chance. Not now the floodgates were opened.
‘Ross told me. Jake had gloated that he’d murdered Lara Hardie and framed Ross for it. He told him all the details except for where he’d hidden the body. He said if Ross didn’t give me up, he’d tell the police where the body was. And there would be enough there to incriminate him.’
The room fell quiet for a long moment. Mary Considine leaned in to her client and spoke too softly for them to hear. Rosalind shook her head and whispered something in return.
‘I need a moment with my client.’
Karen didn’t want to relinquish the momentum but she knew she had no choice. She stood up. Daisy turned off the recording and together they walked out.
‘We’ve got her,’ Daisy said. ‘She’s admitted knowing about the murder.’
‘And I hope that’s what Mary Considine is impressing upon her right now.’
Daisy squatted down, leaning against the wall. Karen was too fired up with adrenaline to stand still, and she paced back and forth, running the options for the next phase of the attack. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Then Mary Considine emerged. ‘What can you do for my client?’
‘That depends on what she can do for me.’
‘If I was to posit that she had no knowledge of who killed Lara Hardie or when, but that she believed what her lover told her and acted out of fear, how would that play for you?’
Karen shook her head. ‘Why would that play anything but a bum note for me? We’ve already got her admitting to knowing about a murder she didn’t report to the police. We’ve got her lying to us about their relationship. We’re convinced we can prove that Ross McEwen wrote the manuscript account of the murder. It’s a stretch to believe he could have got so many details right if he hadn’t committed the crime. Trying to hide behind Jake Stein as the killer just won’t play.’
Considine held her stare. ‘If you’re still open to discussion, let me talk further to my client.’
‘Take your time. We’re off to have a conversation with Mr McEwen. Maybe he’ll be more forthcoming.’
Considine scowled. ‘That I doubt, unless you’ve suddenly discovered some interrogatory skills.’ She turned on her heel and returned to the interview room.
‘Harsh,’ Daisy said.
‘Lawyers’ games. Come on, let’s see what Ross McEwen has to say for himself.’
McEwen’s lawyer had arrived, a pudgy, pink-faced man. His hair sat in a fluffy blond halo round his head and his round tortoiseshell glasses perched on the end of his nose. He’d have to be bloody good to overcome those handicaps, Karen thought. The evidence of that lay in a beautifully tailored suit and massive gold cufflinks engraved with some fancy crest. ‘I’m Richard Balfour,’ he announced in a tone that implied they should recognise his name and tremble. ‘I’m here to represent Mr McEwen and I must protest at the way my client has been dragged here from his home and kept waiting for a significant amount of time for an interview that could equally well have been conducted under his own roof.’
Karen wanted to ask whether he was paid by the word, but told herself it was too soon for that. ‘Duly noted,’ she said. Daisy set up the recording and they all recited their names. Karen reminded them that this was an interview under caution.
‘My client has no idea why you are interviewing him under caution.’
‘He might not have told you, but I’m sure he does. Mr McEwen, can you explain how the remains of Lara Hardie came to be in your garage?’
He leaned back in his chair and shrugged. ‘I can’t be sure, but I think they were placed there by the late Jake Stein in an attempt to incriminate me in her murder.’ Balfour was scribbling away on his legal pad with a Mont Blanc pen, frowning all the while.
‘Interesting that you use that word. I don’t recall anyone involved in this investigation talking about murder.’
‘What can I say? I’m a crime writer. Human remains in unexpected places shout murder to me.’
‘Why would Jake Stein want to incriminate you?’
‘Because he was a nasty, mean-tempered bully who resented the fact that his ex-wife had found happiness with me.’
Balfour squirmed in his chair.
Karen made a note. ‘That’s not quite the timeline though, is it? Ms Harris had “found happiness” with you some time before her marriage ended. You were having an affair behind his back.’
‘We didn’t realise he knew. Until he told me he was going to make me pay for it, I thought we’d managed to keep our secret to ourselves.’
‘What was your reaction to his threat?’
McEwen shrugged again. ‘I laughed and told him not to be pathetic. That Ros was a grown woman who could make her own choices.’
‘But that wasn’t the end of it, was it?’
He drummed a tattoo on the table with his fingers. ‘Obviously not or you wouldn’t be wasting our time here in the middle of the night.’
‘You decided, like any serious chess player, that the only strategy was to take Jake Stein off the board.’
He laughed. ‘Really, Pirie, you should consider a new career in stand-up. It’s true that I write about murder. I probably know more undetectable ways to kill than you do. But I don’t do it for real.’
‘Not even to see what it would feel like?’
Balfour leaned forward. ‘That’s a very offensive question, Chief Inspector. Are you planning on presenting any evidence at any point?’
‘I was working up to it, but we’ll cut to the chase.’ She opened her folder and took out the printouts of the jpegs Jason had sent her an hour earlier. She laid them out in front of McEwen, who had suddenly stilled. ‘You see the date stamp in the corner?’
He nodded.
‘Mr McEwen, would you speak, for the recording?’
‘Yes, I see it.’
‘That is the date that Lara Hardie disappeared. Is that your car? You can see the number plate quite clearly.’
He glared at her. ‘It’s a car like mine with the same number plate as my car.’
‘What? Someone cloned your car?’
‘I think this is when Jake Stein borrowed my car.’
‘It doesn’t look like Jake Stein in the driver’s seat.’
He scoffed and waved the photograph at his lawyer. ‘It doesn’t look like anybody. It could be Prince bloody Charles.’
Balfour nodded. ‘You’d struggle to get a Fiscal Depute to agree with you there, never mind a jury, Chief Inspector.’
Karen shrugged. ‘Fair enough. I didn’t really expect you to cop to that. But you’d agree that there is someone in the passenger seat? Someone with light-coloured hair?’
‘I suppose,’ McEwen said, sulky now.
Karen took the second picture from the file. The second camera was assisted by the spotlights on the facade of the office that lit up the entrance at night. ‘Same date stamp, three hours and twenty-seven minutes later.’
She laid it down, face up. ‘Just you, this time.’
McEwen stared at the picture. His car, his car’s number plate and his face clearly illumined. ‘You’ve faked this,’ he said.
‘No, we haven’t. Unless you’re going to claim this is Jake Stein in a Ross McEwen mask?’
‘I was at the caravan site perfectly legitimately, checking on our friend Olga’s caravan.’
‘And your passenger? What happened to her?’
He shook his head. ‘I had no passenger. It’s obviously a trick of the light.’
‘We think your passenger was Lara Hardie. That you took her to that caravan for the sole purpose of murdering her.’
His laugh was confident. ‘Really, this is beyond bizarre. Why on earth would I murder Lara Hardie? She was a virtual stranger to me. I barely remember encountering her.’
Karen closed her eyes momentarily and breathed heavily through her nose. ‘Lara Hardie came to you for help because she idolised you. She wasn’t just any other wannabe, though. She had real talent.’
His lip curled in scorn. ‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d read her novel.’
‘I’ve read her short story.’ Karen enjoyed the tightening of his shoulders. ‘The one that won the National Short Story Award last year.’ Karen let the pause grow. ‘You must remember that one, Ross? “Memorial Garden” – the one you stole from her.’
‘Is this the sort of bullshit your usual customers fall for? You’re living on fantasy island. I wrote “Memorial Garden”.’
‘I don’t think you did.’ Karen produced Lara’s writing diary and opened it at the page she’d bookmarked. She pushed it towards him. ‘Would you like to read that?’
He looked away. ‘I’m not playing your stupid game. Lara copied that from my story, not the other way round.’
‘She’d have had to fake the whole diary to get the dates right.’ Karen riffled the edges of the pages.
‘People with obsessions have done more than that. She copied me.’
He was good, she had to admit that to herself. But was he good enough?
49
Dawn, and Karen was sitting on a bench on the grassy patch outside the Gayfield Square police station. Not for the first time, she marvelled at the rich variety of birdsong in the city centre. There were enough trees and green spaces to provide habitats for all sorts of birds. She’d even seen the iridescent flash of a kingfisher on the Water of Leith.
She’d sent Daisy back to the flat for sleep and food. But she had to wait for Ruth Wardlaw, the Fiscal Depute, to read through the docket of evidence Karen had prepared. Then she would decide what, if any charges should be laid against Ross McEwen and Rosalind Harris. Usually by the time they reached this point in a case, Karen had little doubt what would be presented to the court. But this time, she wasn’t certain she’d put together a strong enough case.
They’d have had next to nothing without the security camera footage. It was hard to imagine why McEwen had been so careless about that. He’d been so meticulous about every other detail. Maybe he’d thought the police weren’t smart enough to join up the dots to Olga’s caravan. Maybe he’d not been quite as well prepared as he thought; the success of Lara’s story had caught him on the back foot. Maybe he’d underestimated the quality of the image on the cameras after dark. Whatever the reason, it had been disastrous for him. All the clever plotting that worked on the page wouldn’t be enough to get him out of this. She hoped.
McEwen had to be going down. Jason’s digital trawl had made that happen. He’d gone back through the CCTV footage and found a previous visit to Olga’s caravan two days earlier, presumably to do the set dressing.
It would be a complicated trial, but Karen thought a good advocate could make sense of it for the jury. But if Rosalind Harris stuck to her story, they’d be hard-pressed to charge her with anything more than obstructing justice. A jury might buy her version of events – the psychologically abused woman who hadn’t been able to stand up for herself twice over. A sympathetic jury might let her walk free.
She tilted her head back and savoured the city air, clearer than she’d ever known it. Having virtually no traffic had transformed the quality of life. Would everyone simply return to their old habits once the pandemic was over, or would they have learned what Karen already knew – that walking the city was its own reward? Time for thought, time to spy on the lives of others, time to discover new routes and expand the mental map.
One thing would definitely not be the same for her. She was done with Hamish. Even before the moment Teegan had demonstrated how he thought he was above the letter of the law, she’d been stifling doubts and tamping down resentments. She was tired of capitulating, tired of feeling there was something wrong with her.
He wasn’t a bad man. Just not the right man for her. She could see now that she’d allowed herself to let him into her life precisely because he was so different from Phil. There would never be any real comparison. And Hamish had helped her to heal. She would never take that away from him.
