Past Lying, page 22
She found Daisy already set up at the dining table, laptop open before her. She looked up when Karen came in, and offered a wan smile. ‘Morning, boss. How did it go?’
‘The Mint’s suspended, my coat’s on a shoogly peg. The Dog Biscuit wasn’t keen on the alibi. As we speak, some poor polis will be trawling through phone mast records, trying to establish the whereabouts of Jason’s phone when he was making those calls yesterday. Total waste of time and energy.’ She carried on to the kitchen. ‘I need coffee.’
Daisy stood up and followed her. ‘How’s Jason? Any more news about his mum?’
‘No change, as far as they’re telling him. Poor lad’s climbing the walls.’
‘Who wouldn’t be, in his shoes? So was it his brother that “borrowed” his kit?’ Daisy made quote marks in the air with her fingers, not trusting her tone of voice to do it for her.
‘Jason’s not admitting it, but it’s obviously Ronan. He’s been a bad boy since he was a teenager and he shows no signs of maturity yet. But Jason’s too loyal for his own good – he’s not going to grass him up to Markie.’ She scooped coffee into the press. ‘I might, though.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye, really. I don’t mind Ronan fucking up his own life, but I do mind him fucking up Jason’s. If this is still rumbling on by the time Sandra gets home then, yeah, I might just dob him in.’
Daisy looked doubtful. ‘What if . . . what if she doesn’t get home?’
Karen gave her a hard stare. ‘Then we’ll all have more pressing issues to deal with.’ She pressed the plunger with unnecessary vigour.
Back at their makeshift workspace, Karen started in on her coffee. ‘So, I spoke to the woman at Invertay. I don’t understand nice middle-class, law-abiding people whose instincts are to obstruct us. She’s supposed to have sent me the list of people at the workshop,’ she added, already distracted by the process of signing in to her laptop. ‘Here we go.’
There was an email from Susie Donaldson with an attachment. Karen forwarded it to Daisy, then opened it herself. Sixteen names were listed, each with an email address, a mobile number and the amount they’d paid to attend. It looked as if there were discounts for seniors and for students. Seventh on the list was Lara Hardie. Daisy let out a low whistle. ‘Good work, boss. What do we do now?’ The arrival of the list had clearly perked Daisy up.
‘Did that manuscript of Lara’s arrive yet?’
Daisy nodded. ‘Just before you got back. I’d barely started reading it.’
Karen paused for a moment. ‘OK. You carry on with that, and I’ll split the list with Jason. He needs something to stop him climbing the walls. And there’s no point in him carrying on with checking out the other events Jake Stein did. We’ve placed Stein in the same room as Lara. If we’re lucky, someone will have noticed an interaction between them.’
‘I thought you said Jason was suspended?’
‘I know, but he needs to keep occupied, for his own sake, never mind Eilidh’s. And who’s going to find out? These are just investigative calls. If we need probative statements, we can go back to the witnesses later and put it on the record.’
‘Or I could share the calls with you?’
Karen shook her head. ‘I need you on Lara’s manuscript. You’ve read Stein’s version of events and his notes. We need to check whether there’s any crossover and you’re best placed to spot that.’
Daisy shrugged. ‘Wish me luck.’
‘We all need buckets of luck on this one.’
This time, it was Jason who got lucky. He’d been anxious about the task; he didn’t think he was sufficiently on the ball to do a great job. But Eilidh encouraged him. ‘Just concentrate on what’s in front of you, doll. You’ll do fine.’
Lockdown meant that almost everybody was at home to take their calls; he reckoned it was taking about half the time it would usually consume to get through the preliminary interviews. After a couple of conversations, he’d learned that the workshop had begun with an ice-breaking session. Each attendee – three men and thirteen women – was paired with the person sitting next to them. They had ten minutes to find out some key information about their partner, then they had to introduce them to the group.
The workshop proper involved Jake Stein giving fifteen-minute lectures on aspects of writing, followed by him setting an exercise. They’d have fifteen minutes to complete it, then they’d all read out what they’d written; Stein and the others would give critical comments. ‘They’re supposed to be constructive criticisms,’ Del Morrison had said. ‘Mostly they were encouraging, but sometimes Jake cut through the crap and said things that felt a bit like a put-down. Nothing you could really pin down, but the kind of thing you don’t want someone to say about your writing.’
‘Like what?’
A sigh. ‘I can’t really remember but he did say to me after the dialogue session, “Such a shame Take the High Road isn’t on any more.” ’
‘Ouch!’ Jason could barely remember the long-running Scottish soap, but he recalled enough to realise Stein’s comment had not been complimentary. ‘Do you remember anything specific he said to Lara?’
‘Not off the top of my head. I don’t honestly remember much about her. She was pretty quiet. You know the kind of lassie? Doesn’t speak up much, nods a lot at what other people say. She seemed nice enough, just kind of beige.’
Del was the third person Jason had spoken to. Neither of the others had anything more informative to offer. But he struck oil with the fourth. Jenna Butt had been paired with Lara for the first exercise. ‘She was very precise,’ she said. ‘She told me she’d been to a workshop before—’
‘When was that?’ Jason’s ears pricked up.
‘I don’t remember exactly, but a while back. Anyway, she said she’d made such an idiot of herself the last time that she was determined to get it right this time if we were asked to introduce each other. So she’d prepped. Wish I’d done the same, I ended up babbling like a bubblyjock.’
Jason had no idea what a bubblyjock was, but he didn’t think that mattered. ‘What do you remember Lara saying?’
‘She was a student in Edinburgh. She didn’t say which uni or college, but she said she was doing English. She was doing a module in Twentieth-Century Scottish Fiction. Her favourite writer was Muriel Spark. I remember because I’ve never been able to get on with Muriel Spark. I don’t get the way she writes. Do you like Spark?’
‘I don’t get much time for reading.’ His English teacher had tried to get them to read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and he’d thought it was daft. ‘What else did she have to say?’
‘She wanted to write crime fiction, mostly because of Kate Atkinson. But she admitted that Jake Stein was her guilty pleasure. And she wished she could write with the kind of pace he had in his books.’ Jenna chuckled. ‘I thought she was just sooking up to Jake, but no, she really hung on his every word. She took loads of notes. Like he knew the secrets of the universe and she was going to rip them out of his hands.’
‘Did she ask a lot of questions too?’
Jenna considered. ‘Not that I remember. But she did kind of hang around him at the tea breaks. On the fringes of the group.’
‘Did you talk to her outside the sessions? Like, at the lunch break?’
‘Not so much. There were a few of us hung out together. We were talking about what we were working on, what kind of writer we wanted to be.’ She chuckled again. ‘I said, “a bestselling one”. I don’t remember what Lara said.’ She pulled a face. ‘To be honest, I don’t think I’d even remember this much if she hadn’t been all over the media when she went missing. I didn’t even notice it at first, it was one of the other women at the workshop who DM’d me. We’d stayed in touch because we’re both writing sort of feminist counterfactuals, and she called to say Lara was all over Twitter.’
‘Do you mind telling me who that was?’
‘She must be on your list, right? Alice Barker.’
‘She’s here, yes.’ And he’d already spoken to her.
‘She was talking to Lara outside in the car park at the end of the event. That’s why she remembered her.’
Jason put an asterisk next to the name on his printout. Why would Alice Barker have pretended not to know anything about Lara Hardie? ‘Did she say what they talked about?’
‘Just that it had been a good workshop. Lara probably didn’t get a chance to say anything, Alice was so full of how brilliant it had been and how much she’d learned about story structure.’
‘Fair enough. Is there anything else you can remember about that day? Anybody else Lara talked to? Anything about what she was writing?’
‘Sorry, officer. I’ve shot my bolt. Listen, good luck finding out what happened to Lara. She seemed like a nice lassie. It’s hard to imagine her provoking anybody to violence, you know what I mean?’
‘My boss always says it’s never the victim’s fault. Being violent is always an active choice, she says. So if something bad happened to Lara, it wasn’t about what she did or how she was. It was about a choice somebody else made.’
A moment’s silence. Then Jenna said, ‘Wow. Your boss sounds amazing.’
‘She is. Thanks for your help, Jenna, you’ve been a star.’
Jason sat staring at his phone. He needed to process what Jenna Butt had told him. He didn’t want to send the voice recording of his interview to Karen until he’d cleared up the disconnect between what Jenna and Alice Barker had said. There had to be a reason for Alice not to be honest with him. Sometimes people lied about contact with victims for innocent reasons, like they were afraid of being caught up in something embarrassing. Or they didn’t want their partners to find out.
But sometimes the reasons were less innocent. It was hard to work out how Alice Barker might fit into their theory of what had happened to Lara Hardie. Jason was well aware that he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the block, and this was one of those times when he feared there might be a simple explanation he wasn’t seeing. It wouldn’t be the first time.
What would Phil do? It was his touchstone for so many of his decisions. The answer wasn’t always immediately obvious. But this time it was. ‘Talk to the boss,’ he said aloud, picking up his phone again.
26
Frustration was buzzing in Karen’s veins as she ended the penultimate call on her list. Yes, people remembered Lara, mostly because a few weeks after the workshop, her face had been everywhere. Online, in print, even on TV. Her parents making an appeal that almost everyone believed would be fruitless. But Lara’s fellow aspirants on the writing seminar recalled almost nothing. Quiet. Not pushy. Attentive. ‘Keen to write propulsive crime fiction,’ was the most informative line she’d got. There wasn’t even anyone trying to big-up their connection for a place in the limelight.
She was about to make her final call when her phone rang. Jason. Every time his name appeared on her screen now, she feared the worst. ‘Jason. I hope you’re having more luck than me.’
‘A wee bit, I think. I’ve just pinged you a voice memo from my last call. When you’ve listened to it, can I talk to you? There’s this lassie, Alice Barker. She denied that she’d even noticed Lara. But one of the others says different.’ Hesitant, flat. He didn’t sound at all like himself.
‘Sure. Ronan been in touch? Any more news about your mum?’
‘I spoke to the hospital earlier. She’s still very poorly, they said, but she’s not any worse.’ A catch in his voice. ‘She must be feeling like we’ve deserted her.’
Karen doubted whether he was right. If Sandra was consciously feeling anything, she suspected it would be abject terror. ‘She knows you’d be there if you could,’ she said, noting he hadn’t mentioned his reprobate brother. ‘I’ll call you when I’ve listened to the interviews.’
Jason’s interviews were less illuminating than she’d hoped, though it did seem clear that Lara was impressed by Stein. And like Jason, she also wondered what was going on with Alice Barker. She rang him back. ‘Alice Barker,’ she said.
‘Yeah. When I spoke to Jenna, she said Alice had spoken to Lara outside. That it had been Alice who brought Lara’s disappearance to her attention. But Alice told me she barely remembered Lara and didn’t speak to her.’
‘So either Jenna’s being quite the bitch about Alice being self-obsessed or Alice lied to you.’
‘Jenna’s her pal,’ he protested.
‘I reserve some of my best bitchiness for my pals,’ Karen said wryly. ‘But you’re right, it’s way more likely that Alice is being economical with the truth. Call her back and confront her with it.’
A pause. ‘You want me to do it?’
‘Why not? You’re more than capable. You want me to hand it over to Daisy?’ Who immediately perked up, like a terrier whose leash has been taken off its hook.
‘No, but I’m suspended. Alice Barker could turn out to be a probative interview. And then we’d be stuffed if it ever came to court.’
‘The way this is going, it’s never going to go to court because the man we believe to be the perpetrator is dead.’
‘We might be wrong. Then we’d be stuffed.’
Karen was startled to be put on the back foot by Jason. But she couldn’t deny he was right. ‘Jings, Jason, you’re more on the ball than me today. You’re right. Leave it with me, then. I’ll do it.’
‘Is there anything else I can be doing?’ His voice was plaintive.
She was momentarily at a loss. ‘Tell you what, I’ll drop off a copy of the original manuscript at the HCU office. You can pick it up from there and go through it. A fresh pair of eyes, and all that. Keep it on the down low, though. I doubt the crew at Gayfield Square will have heard you’re on suspension, but let’s not tempt fate.’
A sigh of relief. ‘Thanks, boss. I’ll do that.’
‘And let me know if you hear any more from the hospital.’ A pause. ‘Or Ronan.’
Karen was itching to talk to Alice Barker, but she knew she had to get the manuscript over to the office. Jason would already be out the door and striding up Leith Walk. ‘I’ll be back soon,’ she said.
‘I could go,’ Daisy said. ‘You’ve already had to go out today.’
Karen sighed. ‘I don’t want you to lose the thread of what you’re reading.’
Daisy pulled a face. ‘Trust me, this is not going to win the Golden Thistle. I’d be glad of a wee break.’ Karen simply handed her The Vanishing of Laurel Oliver and the accompanying outline notes. ‘See you later,’ Daisy said cheerily. ‘I might have to make a wee detour on the way back to the Tesco on Picardy Place. We’re out of crisps and chocolate. And I’d kill for a fruit scone.’
Not for the first time, Karen envied Daisy’s ability to consume massive amounts of fattening carbs without ever seeming to put on a kilo. The christening fairy had not given Karen the gift of a high-speed metabolism; all the things she most enjoyed eating took swift revenge. If it wasn’t for her habit of long night walks, she’d be the size of a house. It wasn’t fair. When she’d complained about this to Hamish, he’d laughed and said, ‘But you got the brains instead.’ Sometimes it didn’t feel like an equivalence.
Like now. Karen wasn’t easily discouraged, but this case wasn’t playing to her strengths. When she conducted interviews, whether with witnesses or suspects, she liked to see them. The way they sat; the set of their shoulders; how the small muscles of their faces responded; the unconscious reactions of their mouths and eyes; when they were still and when they fidgeted: all of that helped her form a sense of when they were moving away from truth. Even the movement of their feet. She remembered once watching an episode of a cop series where the director had kept returning to shots of the suspect’s feet. It had been strangely compelling, offering a previously unconsidered bit of body language to process.
Phil had once said she should write a book on how to read people. There were two problems with that. For one thing, everything she tried to write turned out like a police report, even Valentine cards. But more importantly, she didn’t know how to formulate the way she arrived at her conclusions. The nearest she could get was that it was a mixture of experience and instinct, and those were two things that couldn’t be taught.
She listened again to the recording of Jason’s interview with Jenna Butt, making a couple of notes as it played. Then she put her earphones in, the better to hear variations in tone, and called Alice Barker’s mobile. It rang out half a dozen times then a voice said, ‘Hello? Who is this?’ Even in those four short words, Karen recognised educated Edinburgh, a voice accustomed to being attended to.
‘Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie of the Historic Cases Unit of Police Scotland.’ She scoffed. ‘Sorry, it’s a bit of a mouthful.’
‘What’s this about? I spoke to one of you already today. Don’t you communicate with each other?’
It sounded to Karen as if she was moving as she spoke. The closing of a door confirmed that. ‘We do. And that’s why I’m making this follow-up call. I need to clarify some things you said to my junior officer.’
‘Clarify what? He asked me about someone who was at a writing workshop with me more than a year ago. I barely noticed her.’
‘I’m afraid that doesn’t tally with what one of your fellow attendees remembers.’
‘Well, they’re wrong. What I told the other officer is all I have to say.’
‘One of our other witnesses has told us that you talked to Lara Hardie for a few minutes after the workshop was over.’
A beat. ‘They’re mistaken.’
‘All I want to know is what you talked about. What Lara Hardie said to you. It’s probably nothing relevant to our inquiries, but I need to be sure I’ve covered every angle that might shine a light on her disappearance.’
