Past Lying, page 34
‘That’s terrific work. Are you OK with doing all this?’
‘Uh huh. It takes my mind off my mum. Do you want me to see what I can find out about the Blackadder lassie and Olga what’s-her-name?’
‘That’s a good idea. Start with Deni Blackadder – she’s a crime writer, I think.’
‘According to Louise the bookseller, Olga’s a poet and a translator.’
‘Less likely to have been pals with either Stein or McEwen, then. They all seem to stick to their silos.’
‘I’m on it.’
She hung up, feeling a little burn of excitement in her chest. She turned back to the garage, where River was readying herself for a second round of delving into the horrors of the human slurry. There was nothing Karen could do there, so she made for the house. She found Daisy in the kitchen, reading a Sri Lankan cookbook. ‘He’s in his study, playing on the X-box,’ she said. ‘He made a big performance of leaving his phone on the counter, going on about he didn’t want me thinking he was sneaking phone calls behind my back. Like I don’t know you can message people in-game.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Somehow, I don’t see Ros Harris playing console games in office hours.’
‘He’s too savvy to be having incriminating conversations with anybody,’ Karen said. ‘Jason’s got a statement putting him at that event the night before Lara went missing.’
Daisy sat up sharply, letting the book fall from her. ‘You’re kidding!’
‘It’s only circumstantial. He wasn’t seen with Lara. But Jason’s chasing something up that might help us further along the way.’
Daisy looked momentarily put out. ‘Nothing I can help with?’
‘No need, he’s got it covered. It’s something to focus on that isn’t his mum in the COVID ward or his brother in custody.’ Karen settled in one of the armchairs by the window and took out her phone.
She googled Deni Blackadder. Thirty-two, single, born and raised in Stirling. A distant cousin of the exceptional Scottish artist Elizabeth Blackadder, and author of three crime novels. She clicked through to her webpage, where the first thing she saw among several endorsements was one from Ross McEwen. ‘Just when you thought there was nothing new under the crime fiction sun, along comes Deni Blackadder.’ So there was a link.
It didn’t prove anything. But it was suggestive. She went back to the Google results and spotted a recent podcast Deni had featured on. She popped her earphones in and pressed play. She was ‘in conversation’ with the Mystery Maven, who talked to crime writers about their life and work. There was nothing that caught Karen’s interest till they got to the bit about how Deni was first published. ‘I did a masterclass with Ross McEwen, and he was incredibly supportive. He said he loved what I’d written but that there were a couple of issues. One was structural, and hearing that made me want to go outside and howl at the moon because nobody loves a structural rewrite!’ Laughter. ‘But when he broke it down for me I could see it was more about moving bits of text around to change the order of when we get to know what we get to know.
‘The other issue was that the protagonist was too clichéd. That was hard to hear but surprisingly easy to fix. So I did the rewrites with Ross’s encouragement and sent it to Katya Green, who is now my agent. And she did the rest. I’d never have made it without their input.’ This, Karen thought, was investigative gold.
She listened to the rest of the podcast but heard nothing of interest, except that Deni was doing lockdown in her cabin. ‘I couldn’t face seeing the city so denuded of people, of personality. So I took off to my tiny wee but and ben down the coast, looking out over the North Sea. I feel very privileged.’
Karen looked across at Daisy. ‘How do you fancy a wee run down the coast tomorrow? Cockburnspath?’
‘Will it involve fish and chips?’
It was time, Karen thought as she climbed the stairs to Hamish’s flat. She couldn’t ignore him forever. She fixed herself an Arbikie’s AK gin with ginger ale and went through to the study. Long swig, short text.
Is this a good time to talk?
Almost as soon as she’d sent it, the FaceTime alert sounded. Karen connected and Hamish grinned out at her. ‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to ignore me forever,’ he said.
‘This isn’t capitulation. It’s a truce.’
He shrugged. He was looking particularly well, she thought. Beard trimmed, hair artfully tousled. It was almost as if he’d been expecting her. ‘Call it what you will, we’re talking. And that’s how we fix things.’
‘We fix things by making changes, Hamish. And I don’t know whether the two of us are capable of making the kind of changes we need.’
‘We won’t know until we try.’ He frowned. ‘And I’m willing to try. You know how I feel about you. I love it when we’re out and about, enjoying ourselves. Or staying in, enjoying ourselves. My friends think you’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m sure when you meet my parents they’ll think the same.’
‘Whoa! Who said anything about meeting your parents? You’re rushing at things we’ve never talked about, making out like they’re the logical next step when they’re a massive jump.’
He threw his hands in the air. ‘That’s because it feels like the next step. It’s what people do when they’re serious about each other. I’ve met your parents, haven’t I?’
Karen’s heart sank. ‘Only by accident.’ Her parents had come over from Kirkcaldy for lunch one Saturday. Hamish had arrived unexpectedly – although she’d told him they were coming – just as she was serving the rhubarb crumble and custard. He’d been effusive and charming and her parents couldn’t get out the door fast enough. Later, her mother said, ‘He’s a smooth operator, right enough.’ Her father had just grunted. The next time they’d been alone, he’d said, ‘Are you sure about yon lad? You seem different when you’re with him. Not like when you were with Phil. Then, you were yourself. Just more.’
For her father it was a major speech. It had given her pause, but maybe not enough. ‘They’ve not met many folk like you.’
‘What? Because I grew up in the US? Because I’m a businessman? Because I’ve made money? Come on, Karen, they’re not as small-minded as all that.’
‘We’re different, Hamish. And you don’t always get it. I grew up in a working-class home in a working-class town here in Scotland. I look at the world through a different prism to the one you use. You think throwing money at a problem is a solution. I’ve grown up without that option so I have to work at things to sort them out.’
‘Karen, I work hard for what I have. I’m not going to apologise for enjoying the fruits of my success.’
She sighed. ‘And there’s nothing wrong with that. But you make assumptions all the time about what I’ll enjoy. Half the time I feel like you’ve got a completely different woman in your sights. You don’t see me. You don’t hear me.’
There was a long pause. ‘But I love you,’ he said simply, all the bombast stripped away.
‘But do you? I think the person you love is not me.’
‘When we make love, none of that matters. We fuse. We’re a perfect match.’
‘When we make love, it papers over the cracks because it’s so good.’ Karen was beginning to feel cornered, and not for the first time. ‘Your reaction when you found Rafiq in my flat frightened me. Not because you were scary – which you clearly were – but because it was a side of yourself you’d kept hidden from me.’
‘No, that’s not—’
‘Let me speak, Hamish,’ she said, raising her voice to bat him away. ‘I’ve seen men who bully women too many times to take that behaviour lightly.’
‘I don’t bully you.’
‘Not now, you don’t. And I’d like to think I’d be strong enough to stand up to you. But jealousy is an ugly thing and you had absolutely no reason to distrust me. Absolutely no reason to be jealous of Rafiq. A guy on the run from people who had murdered his wife and son, a man living in constant fear. And you freaked him out. What happens the next time you think you have grounds for jealousy? What happens if the other man is not somebody you can bully? Will it be me you turn on?’
A long silence. ‘All I’ve done is to love you.’ His voice was quiet.
‘I know that’s how you see it. And I thought I could maybe love you. But I don’t think I can. So I think it would be better all round if we stuck to what I said the other night. When lockdown is over, I’ll move back to my place and we’ll shake hands and call it a day.’
‘You’re making a terrible mistake here, Karen.’
And that was the moment when a woman’s voice called out from off-screen, ‘Dinner’ll be on the table in five minutes, Hamish.’
‘Who’s that? Is it Teegan?’
His eyes flicked in the direction of the kitchen. ‘That’s right. She’s cooking the dinner.’
‘Why is she cooking your dinner? I thought she was shacked up in the yurt?’
‘She is, yeah, but we’ve been taking turns with cooking the dinner for each other a couple of times a week.’
Karen could hardly believe her ears. ‘Hamish, that’s a total breach of the regulations. Teegan and you, you’re not a bubble.’ A horrible pause. ‘Or are you?’ She’d never doubted him before, not for a moment.
There was nothing artificial about his laugh. It was Hamish, loud and hearty as always. ‘God, no. How could you even think that?’
‘So there’s no excuse for you completely ignoring the COVID rules? Hamish, they’re in place for a reason. They apply to everybody—’
‘Not you, when you’re out and about chasing a case.’ He was still grinning.
‘Yes, me. There are certain exemptions for policing, but that doesn’t extend to getting one of the neighbours in to cook my tea. What gives you the right to trash the rules?’
‘Karen, Teegan and I work the sheep together every day. Anything I’ve got, she’s got. It’s just bureaucracy.’
‘Your attitude is the reason people like Jason’s mum are in hospital right now. Everything you’ve said has made me realise I was absolutely right to say this thing is over,’ she said coolly and broke the connection.
43
They were about to leave for Cockburnspath when Karen’s phone pinged. The message from River said,
I’ve emailed you the dentals for the remains. More later . . .
She called Daisy back to where they’d been working and asked her to pull up Lara Hardie’s dental records, routinely acquired by the initial investigation. Just in case. Meanwhile, she opened the email attachment River had sent. Both used the same format for recording the mouth; they were a perfect match. The upper left canine was, usefully, an implant. ‘It’s Lara,’ Karen said heavily.
‘Are we going to see the parents?’
Karen sighed. ‘I think I want to wait for DNA.’
Daisy was shocked. ‘But you always say, every day a family waits—’
‘Is a day too long,’ Karen chorused with her. ‘I know. But I’d like to get this interview out of the way before the world and his dog know whose body we’ve found. I’ll call the Dog Biscuit when we get back and then we’ll go and see the parents.’
‘You don’t think it’ll leak?’
‘Right now, it’s just us and River who know. And I’d trust her with my life.’ Or my career. ‘Come on, let’s make tracks.’
The cold case detective’s visit had left Emma Hardie wondering whether she’d been painting too much gilding round the memory of her sister. She’d been determined to protect Lara from the easy assumption of her being the kind of stupid wee lassie who’d let the wrong guy give her a lift or slip her a spiked drink.
A few months after Lara’s disappearance, a uniformed PC from the local station had delivered a cardboard carton to the Hardie home. He’d explained it contained material the detectives had examined and had decided had no bearing on whatever had happened to her. Her mother had gone through the contents: lecture notes and essays; a clutch of poems her father had dismissed as ‘sub-Liz Lochhead’; a Moleskine notebook that said ‘Writing diary 2019—’; and a couple of heavily annotated drafts of short stories.
In spite of her desire to find an answer among the papers, her mother had been forced to concede there was no smoking gun. But their encounter with Karen Pirie had fired Emma with the desire to find the missing key that would unlock Lara’s absence. And the box of papers was all she had.
Painstakingly, she’d studied every piece of paper. She read her sister’s essays, even the ones about modernism that made no sense to her. She struggled to read Lara’s scribbled lecture notes which often consisted of a single word, waded through endless pages of draft essays headed clearly and legibly but which soon degenerated into illegibility, and poems she could make neither head nor tail of, often using seagulls as metaphor whether they made sense or not.
She left till last the writing diary. On the first page, Lara had printed, I commit to writing every day. Only practice will make me better. Emma’s chest contracted at the thought of her sister’s determination. It reminded her yet again of what had been taken from her. The entries varied in length; some a couple of sentences, describing work on a piece of prose; others, the opening paragraphs of a story; yet others, the outline of something bigger. There were notes of author events she’d attended, almost exclusively novelists. Then, to Emma’s astonishment, Tomorrow I go north to the Cairngorm Centre for Creative Writing. I’m using my birthday money for a residential course.
Lara had said nothing of this. She had such little faith in her writing abilities, Emma thought. She cast her mind back to September 2018. Lara had said she was going to spend her birthday money youth hostelling in the Highlands with one of her university friends. Instead, she’d paid for the writing course, taught by Louise Welsh and Zoe Strachan, a couple of writers based at Glasgow University. Emma read the diary entries, all infused with excitement at workshops and tutorials, all making copious notes about what she’d learned. And there, in the middle of the week, a guest reader who had spent the evening reading his work and listening to the students reading short excerpts from their work. Ross McEwen had been so taken with the opening of a short story of Lara’s that he’d invited her to send it to him when she’d finished it.
Lara had copied out what she’d read – the opening paragraph of a short story called ‘Memorial Garden’: It wasn’t the first time Katya had seen the stranger in the Garden of Remembrance. Their paths had crossed occasionally, him leaving as she was arriving, or arriving as she was leaving. It had never occurred to her that the man she exchanged polite nods with was the man who had killed her son.
Emma had to admit it was arresting. She read on, hurrying now to find out what had happened with the story. She had to wade through a lot of inconsequential notes before she found out it had taken Lara the best part of a month – and a lot of despair and cursing – to reach a draft she was happy with. When she’d got that far, she’d gone to an event McEwen was doing at a bookshop in Edinburgh. She’d handed over the story. A couple of days later, he’d suggested she come to a workshop he was running in the city in a couple of weeks’ time.
The entry after that workshop read, RM thinks MG is really promising but it lacks pace and suspense. He doesn’t teach those. Suggests I go to Jake Stein workshop. I can’t afford it!!! RM said he’d square it with Jake. Amazing!
It might be completely innocent, Emma realised. Buried away in the diary, it was easy to dismiss. Lara had gone to the workshop, then there was no further reference to either of the writers. Her focus was all on a new story she was writing for a competition. A few weeks later, she’d disappeared.
Emma burned with anger that, as far as she knew, nobody had followed this up. Pirie had asked a couple of half-hearted questions but nothing pointed. Emma felt tears pricking her eyes and she determined to confront the police officer with her failings. Lockdown or no, she was going to show Karen Pirie what she’d missed.
Karen let Daisy drive so she could plan her line of approach. That took until they reached the far side of the ring road. It was a sunny morning, the hills of East Lothian and the distant outline of Fife crisp in the spring light. But Karen had no eyes for the landscape that day. All she had space for in her head was Lara Hardie and how to establish who had killed her. Her thoughts kept running like a hamster in a wheel, so absorbing that it came as a surprise when they reached the end of the dual carriageway and arrived at the hamlet of Cockburnspath. All Karen knew about it was that it was important geologically, a random fact dredged up from schooldays. Daisy made a right-hand turn off the main trunk road, a manoeuvre that would usually take several minutes for a gap to appear in the oncoming traffic. Lockdown had reduced that stream; today, she crossed the carriageway without pause. There was not a soul in sight.
‘What do we do now?’ she asked.
‘When in doubt, chap a door.’ Karen got out and followed her own suggestion. She scanned the skyline till she saw the tell-tale curl of smoke emerging from a chimney. Karen crossed the road, fixed her mask in place and rang the doorbell. A pause, then a man’s voice said, ‘Who is it?’
‘Sorry to trouble you, sir. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie of Police Scotland. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to do with you. I’m just looking for directions for somebody who lives here.’
‘Nobody’s supposed to be outside their houses just now.’
‘It’s police business. We’re allowed. Could you maybe open the door?’
‘No way. Look, see the living room window on the left there? Show me your ID through the glass.’
She couldn’t blame him. Karen stepped over a rose bush, catching her coat on a thorn. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ she muttered under her breath as she disentangled herself. She made it to the window and held up her photo ID. The man who appeared on the other side of the glass looked to be in his mid-thirties, a faded Scottish rugby shirt stretched over the beginnings of a substantial beer gut. He peered at her ID then gave her the thumbs up. He waved at her to step back and when she was a good three metres away, he opened his window. ‘Who are you looking for?’ he demanded.
