Past Lying, page 30
‘It’s a snowboard travelling bag. Does it belong to you, Ross?’ Now her voice was gentle.
‘No way. I’ve never been snowboarding. I hate the cold. When I go on holiday, I head for the sun. The Mediterranean in the summer, Morocco or Sharm El-Sheikh in the winter. I’ve never even seen a snowboard up close and personal. Swear to God.’ He kept staring into the pit, the very picture of bemusement.
Then suddenly it dawned on him. ‘Is there a body in there?’ He faced Karen, his mouth open, his eyes panicked. ‘Are you telling me Lara Hardie’s down there?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Karen said. ‘What do you think?’
He backed away, careful where he was putting his feet. ‘I don’t think anything. This is mad. If there’s anybody down there, it’s fuck all to do with me.’
Karen raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s your garage.’
He squeezed his eyes tight shut, twisting his mouth into a grimace of fear. ‘Whatever happened here, it wasn’t me. Far as I was concerned, it was just an empty hole.’
‘Shall we open it up and see what’s inside?’ Karen moved forward. There was a short flight of concrete steps at one end of the pit.
‘No,’ he howled. ‘You can’t do this to me, you’ve got no right.’
She shrugged. ‘I thought you’d be interested to see what’s buried in your garage, Ross. I would, if it was me, wondering whether there was the body of a young woman down there.’
He convulsed, hand over his mouth. He ran for the door, pushing Daisy to the side. He barely made it to the door before he vomited copiously on his lovely gravel drive. He stood panting, hands on his knees. Finally, he looked round at Karen with an expression of absolute hatred. He straightened up and staggered back to the kitchen door.
‘You don’t think that was a bit harsh, boss?’ Daisy asked.
‘He’s almost certainly got a dead lassie in his garage. How else do you expect me to be?’
When Shane and his team returned, Karen was ready. In their absence, she’d rung Dr River Wilde, forensic anthropologist and probably the nearest Karen had to a best friend. She’d sort out the budget for bringing her up from the Lake District afterwards; if they got the result she expected, the Dog Biscuit couldn’t kick off too much. Karen had outlined what they had so far and what she was expecting. ‘We’re about to open the bag but I thought I’d give you time to get packed.’
‘At least we know I’m not going to get caught up in traffic. Let me know as soon as you’ve got more info.’
Shane looked at the pit, and called over one of his colleagues. Even though the foam had been cut away, the space around the bag was still tight. ‘Isha, you’re about half my size. Are you OK with getting in there and making the cut?’
It was hard to read her reaction behind the mask and the goggles she was wearing. But she nodded and took a breath. ‘Nae bother, Shane.’ All eyes were on her as she made her way down the steps and edged round the bag.
‘Take the cut about a centimetre in from the zip,’ Shane said.
Isha took the plastic protector off the scalpel blade. She placed it where she planned to start cutting then looked up for approval. Shane nodded and she started the long cut. The bag parted and the full stench assaulted them in a wave of rot. Karen felt her gorge rise and had to swallow hard. ‘Bloody hell,’ she heard one of the scene examiners say. Another ran from the garage; she heard him retching. Karen stared down at the disgusting mess that had once been a human being. A few bits of bone emerged from the grisly slurry, including the unmistakable curve of a skull, but there was nothing to give a name to the remains.
‘That’s enough for now,’ Karen said. ‘Thanks, Isha. River will be here soon as, and she’ll figure out how to preserve the remains. All you can do now is process the garage itself, see whether there’s anything of use to us. Not that I’m holding out much hope. But if that’s who we think it is, at least one family will have the start of an answer to the question of what happened to their lassie.’ Karen turned away, and walked back to the house, knowing full well that the start of an answer meant little without the end.
37
Ross McEwen had been stricken when the search team had departed with his laptop, his desktop, his iPad, his mini iPad and his phone, protesting that he couldn’t work without the tools of his trade. ‘We’re not taking your pens or your paper,’ Daisy had pointed out.
‘I can hardly read my own writing,’ he’d complained.
She’d shrugged. ‘Sorry. You could probably pick up a reconditioned laptop relatively cheaply. If you’re desperate.’
‘But how can I do that if I can’t get online to buy it?’
‘Good point. Maybe Ms Harris could buy it for you and have it sent here?’
Karen walked in at that point. ‘Lacking a laptop is probably the least of your worries right now. In fact, it might be a benefit, since it’ll make it harder for the press to contact you.’
‘You’re talking to the press?’
‘It’s going to be impossible to avoid it. As we feared, there are human remains in your garage.’
McEwen seemed to shrink visibly. He crossed his arms over his chest and curled in on himself. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t believe he really did it.’
‘At this point, we have no idea of the identity of the person whose remains we’ve found.’
McEwen stared at Karen. ‘You want me to look at the body? No way. It’s nothing to do with me. I spent one day in a room full of people with her, I can’t identify her.’ He tugged nervously at his beard. ‘I had nothing to do with this.’
‘Nobody could identify her right now, except for a forensic anthropologist.’
He looked nauseated. Any crime writer would have understood Karen’s words. ‘This is a nightmare,’ he groaned.
‘I find myself in a very difficult position, Mr McEwen. On the face of it, you’re prime suspect in a suspicious death. A young woman known to you who disappeared without a trace a year ago may well have turned up dead in your garage. In normal circumstances, you’d be under arrest right now and on your way to a police cell. But on the other hand, we have what appears to be a confession from someone else. However, we can’t confront him with what we think we know because he’s dead.’ Karen sat down opposite McEwen. ‘You see my problem?’
He scoffed. ‘Your problem is not my problem. It’s not that I don’t want to help – it’s just that I can’t. I don’t know how it got there.’
‘Are you still driving the same car you had a year ago? The Prius?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I’m going to have the crime scene techs go over it too. We have to look for any traces of Lara Hardie.’
A sudden look of horror spread across his face. ‘My car . . . I never thought about it before. I lent my car to Jake for a couple of days round about then. I can’t be sure about the date, but I can check with my diary. I was out of town, doing an event in the Borders, in Melrose. I went on the train.’ The broken light of hope appeared on his face. ‘I never made the connection.’
Daisy and Karen exchanged looks. It felt like a convenient recollection. ‘You’re now telling us that Jake Stein had borrowed your car on the night of the disappearance?’ Karen asked, her voice flat. ‘Really?’
He swallowed hard. ‘Yes, his car was in the garage, having something done to it. And he asked if he could borrow mine. I wasn’t using it, I told him he could have it for as long as he needed it. Ask Ros, she’ll remember. Because we had to use her car to go out to dinner at Jamie Scott’s in Newport later in the week. You’ve got to believe me!’
‘Sergeant, come with me,’ Karen said. ‘Wait here for now, Mr McEwen.’
The two women stepped outside. ‘What do we do next?’ Daisy asked, her face eager.
‘In an ideal world, I’d kick it upstairs. But the Dog Biscuit is so fucked off with me right now, she’d just take it off us and let an MIT wrap it up.’
‘Would that be such a bad thing? I mean, we’re not in it for the glory, and everybody would know it was an HCU operation.’
‘This isn’t a vanity project, Daisy. I don’t care who puts it to bed as long as they’ve nailed it down on all four corners. But I’m not convinced the MIT will take it seriously enough. If I’m honest, I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t been desperate for something to get my teeth into. In the normal run of things, I probably wouldn’t have chased it like we have. Now, I have no reason to doubt this was part of a nasty plot by Jake Stein to take revenge on his wife and her new love, to get his own back for his chess partner betraying him. But we have to be even-handed about it. Stein’s not here to defend himself so we have to take on that role. Pick holes in our own case wherever we can.’ Karen threw her hands in the air in frustration. ‘We’re the prosecution and the defence. I’ve never had to do this before.’
‘So what do we do, practically?’
Karen began pacing, thinking aloud. ‘The media are going to be all over this. Somebody will leak it.’ Pause. ‘And then Ross will be fair game. If he was under arrest, they couldn’t get to him.’ Pause. ‘But I don’t want him under arrest because of something Jake Stein did. And I don’t want to open us up to accusations of wrongful arrest either.’ Pause. A sardonic smile. ‘That really would be a budget buster. But we are going to have to leave at least one officer on site. He could keep an eye on things.’
‘Why don’t we try to do a deal?’
Karen paused and gave Daisy a speculative look. ‘What kind of a deal?’
‘Well, technically, he can’t go someplace else anyway, because of the lockdown restrictions. He’d probably want to hole up with the lovely Rosalind, but that’s not an available option, is it? Why don’t you tell him he has to stay put, where we can get our hands on him at any time? And tell him that if he does try to leave, the officer on duty has orders to arrest him on suspicion of murder? The deal is we won’t arrest him yet . . . ’
‘Respect,’ Karen said with an air of surprise. ‘That’s smart. You’ve spent more time with him. D’you think he’d go for it?’
‘Short of chaining the Mint to his ankle, I don’t see what other option we have.’
‘Let’s give it a try. And then I need to shoot off. I’ve got to get to Gayfield Square to spin a yarn to the bobbies who turned up at the breakwater. And then I have to go and interview Rosalind Harris.’
Daisy headed for the kitchen. She paused, fingers resting on the door handle. ‘Is he OK? Your pal Rafiq?’
‘He’s in the wind. I don’t know where he is and that’s probably as well. I hope he finds a safe place. I liked him.’ She turned away and headed for the car. Over her shoulder, she said, ‘Stick around a bit longer, but make sure he understands that he’s effectively under house arrest. Maybe see if he fancies a game of Scrabble. Or chess, if you’re up to it . . . ’
Karen arrived at Gayfield Square to find a uniformed sergeant waiting in the reception area for her, masked and properly distanced. ‘Are you comfortable talking in my office? There’s a good three metres between two of the desks.’
‘That’ll be fine.’
She put his stiff response down to awkwardness at being in someone else’s station. She led the way and entered first, pointing him to Jason’s desk. ‘It’s still weird, trying to do things by the rules,’ she said.
He sat deliberately, and produced his notebook. ‘I don’t think you were entirely managing that last night, were you, Chief Inspector.’ His voice was gruff, his eyebrows rising with the question.
So it was going to be like that. ‘On the contrary. Until the man went in the water, we were being scrupulous. Sergeant Mortimer and I are in a bubble. We’re staying in a flat that belongs to Mr Mackenzie. He has a business that produces hand sanitiser, so he comes to Edinburgh regularly to make deliveries. He contacted me and asked me to collect some urgent paperwork from his desk. We arranged we’d meet down at the Western Harbour Breakwater for the handover. We kept our distance. I put the papers down on a bench and stepped back so Hamish could pick them up.’
From what she could see of his face, he didn’t seem convinced. ‘What was so important about these papers?’
‘All I know is that Hamish said he needed proof of ownership of his new business. It involves a still, so I’m guessing it might be something to do with his licence.’
‘Why the Western Harbour Breakwater? The address I’ve got for you is Forth Street. That’s quite a step. More than an hour’s exercise there and back, I’d have thought.’
‘I have a flat there. It’s permissible to check on unoccupied property. I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone.’
He grunted. ‘Take me through what happened.’
Karen had run through it so many times in her head she’d almost come to believe her version of events. ‘The three of us walked out towards the lighthouse. We were strung out across the path, keeping our distance. When we came out of the shelter of the bushes, I saw a jogger running towards us, from the direction of the lighthouse. He moved on to the breakwater to avoid getting too close to us. I’m not sure whether he tripped or slipped but suddenly he was tumbling down into the water. Hamish stripped off his coat and jumper and his shoes and dived in. Daisy followed. They swam out to where they’d last seen him, but they couldn’t find him. The current’s strong there . . . I called the control room and asked for assistance. The rest you know.’
He sat back in his seat with an air of dissatisfaction. ‘And you say you didn’t know this jogger?’
‘Never seen him before, as far as I’m aware.’
He produced a folded sheet of paper and opened it out for her to see. ‘As far as you’re aware?’
Karen studied the photograph. The mortuary technician had done a good job. He didn’t so much look dead as CGI’d. His skin was pale brown, his brows heavy. A trimmed beard covered the lower part of his face. There was nothing particularly distinctive about him except that the bottom part of his right ear lobe was missing, as if it had been neatly sliced off. She genuinely had never seen him before. She shook her head. ‘It was dark, he had his hood up. A lot of people run along the breakwater these days, I don’t pay much attention to them.’
He took the picture back. ‘We’re releasing that to the media tomorrow and putting it up on the socials.’ Then almost as an afterthought, he said, ‘Are you not the woman that helped the Syrian refugees set up that café down Duke Street?’
‘That’s right. And no, he’s not one of the café crowd, I’m sure of that.’
‘I’ll maybe take a turn down there and see if they can help me.’
‘Good idea. Would you like me to type up my statement and email it to you? Rather than sit here laboriously writing it out? I can have it with you first thing.’ She pushed her chair back, indicating she was done here.
‘That’d be helpful. Thanks, DCI Pirie. I can see myself out.’
She watched him leave. Please God, let there not have been one of her boat-spotting neighbours at their window. There had been a couple of moments there when she’d felt the thin ice cracking beneath her feet.
Karen stirred herself and checked her watch. She reckoned she had time enough to swing by the flat and brew herself a coffee to go. It was turning into a long and stressful day and she felt seriously undercaffeinated. Sometimes she wondered if the effect was as much psychological as physical. Literally, wake up and smell the coffee. Whichever it was, she had to confess she was an addict. Growing up, she’d known no better than instant. But her present requirement for really good coffee was more a marker of her shift into the middle class than anything else she could think of. Maybe if Hamish had been a distiller from the word go instead of a coffee entrepreneur, she’d never have fallen for his charms in the first place. Seduced by a Brazilian single estate . . .
It was a depressing thought for all sorts of reasons.
Karen shoved Hamish to the back of her mind and set off across town to the Meadows, sipping from her keep cup as she went. She managed not to think about Hamish except when she was passing Perk, his hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on George IV Bridge. Closed now, of course. In spite of that blip of memory, she felt her energy levels rising and by the time Rosalind came in sight, she was ready for the next round.
Rosalind launched straight in. ‘So you found the body. Right where Jake’s manuscript said you would. So why are you holding Ross in a kind of house arrest? Either arrest him or let him go.’
‘Go where? We’re in lockdown, as you seem to keep forgetting.’
‘Oh, so it’s good practice to leave him in the middle of a crime scene?’
Karen sighed. ‘I don’t like this any more than either of you does. But the scene examiners have finished with the house. They’re not underfoot any more.’
‘There’s still a body in his garage.’
‘Let’s walk,’ Karen said, tired already of the other woman’s combative approach. She led the way down Jawbone Walk, where they found an empty bench. Karen plonked herself down at one end, gesturing that Rosalind should do likewise at the other end. ‘You’re a lawyer. You know the dangers involved in lying to a polis. I’m giving you one more chance to come clean. Otherwise the next interview will be under caution in a police station.’
‘You’re quick with the threats, DCI Pirie.’
Karen sighed. ‘It’s not a threat. It’s an explanation of the next stage on the route map. When I asked you if your husband had a regular opponent at chess, you lied. You told me you really couldn’t say. But you knew very well that he played every couple of weeks against Ross McEwen.’
Rosalind shrugged. ‘As I said at the time, I really didn’t pay attention.’
‘Not even when you started sleeping with Mr McEwen? You didn’t tell me about that either.’
