Past Lying, page 4
She turned into the vennel leading to the rear entrance of the library. It looked far too innocuous to house millions of books and maps, assorted bits of paper and the set of that electrifying play, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Though she seemed to remember reading somewhere that particular two-metre-high pop-up book was on loan to the V&A in Dundee. Either way, nobody was going to be consulting it now.
A woman she took to be Bethan Carmichael was sitting on a polypropylene chair by the closed door. She was immersed in a paperback, a canvas tote bag leaning against one of the slender metal legs of the chair. A curtain of long dark hair obscured her face. Karen’s trainers made no sound as she approached and she was almost upon the woman before some instinct made her look up. Startled, she jumped to her feet, the legs of the chair screeching as she pushed it back. ‘God, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ She clamped the hand that held the book to her chest. ‘Are you DCI Pirie?’
Karen registered the book title. Around the World in 80 Trees; appropriate enough for someone whose job depended upon the death of trees. She held out her ID. ‘That’s me. Bethan Carmichael, I presume?’ She looked more like a model for a high-end clothes store. Sahara, or Oska, maybe. Unstructured linen, loose trousers, a jacket like a French labourer’s. Her face was all planes and angles; not exactly attractive, but striking, Karen thought.
Carmichael bent to pick up the tote bag and hesitated. ‘I’ve done what you asked,’ she said. ‘But if you think this is going anywhere, I should warn you that there are two whole archive boxes that date from roughly the same period. There are all sorts of scribbles on pieces of paper, some of them possibly related to this material. You may find that you need to go through them with a fine-tooth comb. If so, we’ll have to make special arrangements.’
‘What sort of special arrangements? Why can’t we just take them away? Or have them copied?’
Carmichael rolled her eyes. ‘Because they’ve not been catalogued and assessed by a fully qualified archivist. We’ve only had Jake Stein’s papers for a few months. We’ve not had time to fully prepare the archive. If you did want to go down that road, I’d have to arrange for one of your people to be given access to a room and locked in while they were reading through the material. I’m really not sure even that would be lawful.’ As with so many in these terrified times, her fear had translated itself to hostility.
Karen shrugged. ‘In spite of the pandemic, we’re still supposed to serve and protect. And that means carrying out investigations. This particular inquiry might be a cold case, but if Lara Hardie was murdered, there’s somebody out there who’s killed at least once and might well do so again. It becomes a public protection issue, Bethan. If there’s a can to be carried, I’ll cheerfully do that. But we’ll burn that bridge if we come to it. In the meantime, let us look at what you’ve got for us and we’ll take it from there.’ She held out her hand and Carmichael reluctantly handed over the bag.
‘Let me know how you get on,’ she said.
Karen dipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘When I can. Thanks for this.’ She turned to walk away, then swung back as a thought occurred to her. ‘Who delivered this material to you?’
‘It was part of Jake Stein’s estate,’ she replied. ‘It came from the lawyers who were handling the probate. I think they’d consulted Stein’s ex-wife; there were probably considerations of privacy and Stein’s own conditions to be met.’
‘So someone could have weeded out material they didn’t want anyone else to see?’
‘It’s always a possibility. An ex-wife might well pull letters or notes that showed her in an unfavourable light.’
Karen tutted. ‘Great. Oh well, we’ll have to make the best of what we’ve got.’ She walked off, wishing she could head to the nearest café and dive into the text. But the nearest café, ironically one of Hamish’s Perk chain, was closed, its baristas repurposed as delivery boys. She increased her pace as she pushed on up and over the ridge of the Canongate, hardly able to contain her impatience. In the meantime, she could set Jason to work.
He answered his phone with a cheerful, ‘Hi, boss. So, was Meera right? Are we cooking with gas?’
‘Too early to say, Jason. Daisy and I are going to wade through the manuscript and that will give us a better idea.’
‘Oh. Right.’ He sounded disappointed.
‘In the meantime, I’ve got a job for you.’
‘Oh. Right.’ This time, he resembled a dog that’s been shown the treat.
‘I want you to get online and research Jake Stein. There’ll be a lot of interviews and probably YouTube videos. Plus you’ll need to dig down deep into the socials – Faceplant, Twatter, Slapchat—’
‘That’s not what they’re called, boss.’
Karen rolled her eyes. ‘I want a full timeline of the man’s life and career. See how much you can get for a briefing, OK?’
‘How are we going to do a briefing?’
‘It’ll have to be on the Zoom,’ she sighed. ‘So you’ll need to get up in time to comb your hair.’ She ended the call and forged on. Maybe this was something and nothing. But that was often the case with leads on cold cases. With a little digging in the right place, the unpromising could reveal a hidden path through the thicket of information. And when it came to finding the right place to dig, Karen Pirie was definitely more bloodhound than box-ticker.
That didn’t mean she was optimistic that they’d been handed a revelation that would open the Lara Hardie case like a can-opener. Chances were, this would turn out to be nothing more than a couple of coincidences. But that would also be OK. Karen could run it as if it were the real thing, making it a training and team-building exercise for Jason and Daisy. That was just what they needed. The one case where Daisy had been seconded to the HCU hadn’t told Karen enough about her skills and her practices. And Jason needed reassurance that the arrival of a new team member one rank up from him wasn’t a threat to his standing with Karen. Walking through this odd situation might prove the perfect piece of serendipity.
Either way, it wouldn’t hurt. And it would be more fun than a thousand-piece jigsaw.
6
The Lara Hardie case file contained few surprises, Daisy thought. There was a familiar pattern to this kind of disappearance. The initial report, from friends or family; the excluding of the trifecta of usual reasons – running away for love; ditto for escape; depression leading to suicide. Then the attempt to fill in the hours leading to the vanishing, the door-to-door, the questioning of anyone who knew the misper well. Then the absurd false leads thrown out by the internet and seized on by the conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t easy to disappear without trace these days. Not with CCTV and digital footprints. But Lara had managed it. She’d left the flat she shared with two other students one Monday evening almost a year ago, saying she was going to the library. She never arrived.
She wasn’t in a relationship. Her studies were going well. She wasn’t the life and soul of the party, but she wasn’t someone who provoked antagonism. There was no obvious reason for her to leave her life. One of the flatmates had said she thought Lara had an air of suppressed excitement that didn’t fit with a trip to the library.
There was one distinctive element to this particular disappearance. Lara had suffered since childhood with atonic epileptic seizures. Every few months, she’d experience a moment where all her muscles stopped working. If she was standing or walking, she’d hit the deck. If she was sitting down, she’d slump forward. The last time it had happened, she’d been sitting at a desk in the library and her head had smacked into it with such force she’d ended up with a goose egg on her forehead. But suffering such damage had been rare. Usually, Lara recovered fully almost instantaneously, often not even realising she’d had an episode. She made no fuss about her ailment. She took regular medication; the only deprivation she’d ever commented on to her flatmates was she could neither drive nor cycle.
The media, both news and social, speculated that she’d experienced a seizure that had allowed a passing predator to exploit her illness. No matter how often medical experts expressed frustration at this misrepresentation of her illness, the inaccuracies persisted.
There had been a search, of course. Police dogs, volunteers, the usual. Nothing had turned up. There were some printouts from online news outlets, ranging from WHERE IS PRETTY BLONDE LARA? to EDINBURGH STUDENT GOES MISSING. Always the same, Daisy thought. Blonde white lassie = screaming headlines. Anybody else = a few paragraphs. Nevertheless, it hadn’t made any difference. Lara had slid out of sight without a trace.
Finally, the TV appeal. Lara’s mum and dad were joined by her elder sister, stoic at first, then tearful. Have you seen Lara . . . if you’re keeping Lara . . . Lara, we love you . . . Lara come home. Heartbreaking, but this time, as was usually the case, fruitless. Unless you counted the dozens of time-wasting ‘sightings’.
Daisy was close to the end of the Lara Hardie case file when Karen burst through the door, out of breath from hurrying up three flights of stairs. Daisy pushed her notes to one side and stood up expectantly. ‘Did you get it?’
Karen waved the bag, triumphant as a successful bargain hunter at the sales. ‘I did.’ She moved the empty file box to the floor and spread out her spoils. Two disappointingly scant piles of paper and a memory stick. ‘I managed to keep my hands off all the way home.’ She sounded pleased with herself, and Daisy couldn’t blame her. She’d have squatted in the nearest doorway and stolen a quick look if it had been her.
Daisy approached and they each picked up a set of photocopies. ‘Tell me we get to read it now,’ she said.
‘No reason to hold back,’ Karen said, moving to one of the comfortable armchairs that flanked the fireplace. She tucked a pencil behind her ear and began to read.
THE VANISHING OF LAUREL OLIVER
Part One
Prologue
He really believed it was a madcap game. A joke. A dare, played out between old friends. Why would anyone imagine otherwise? Writing twisted scenarios didn’t mean he believed they happened in the real world. Strangers on a Train had the brilliant premise of two unconnected people swapping murders, but he didn’t believe anybody would be daft enough to try it for real. Not even a card-carrying psychopath like the character in Highsmith’s novel.
It had genuinely never crossed his mind that his best friend would actually commit a murder solely to demonstrate that the perfect crime was possible, and that he was capable of committing it. Not until he had to deal with the revelation that there was now a dead body in his garage.
1
Jamie Cobain and Rob Thomas had met in a curry house in Perth. The one in Scotland, not Australia. They were both there for the crime writing festival the city had hosted for the previous decade. Jamie had never quite worked out why Perth ended up as the venue for the festival. As far as he knew, its only real claim to criminal fame was the maximum security prison celebrated in song by the late Dundee bard Michael Marra in his ‘Letter from Perth’. Other than that, the only reason he could think of for choosing Perth was that it was well served by the motorway network, and by direct trains from Edinburgh and Glasgow. And there was the sleeper to and from London, which was always a consideration when it came to persuading the metropolitans to reach escape velocity from their orbital motorway.
Rob had appeared on the last panel of the Saturday afternoon on the thorny subject of Mad or Bad: Dangerous to Know. Alongside a criminal barrister, a former priest and an escaped wife and mother (her words, not Rob’s), he’d explained his views on why people do the terrible things his imagination conjured up. There were a couple of hundred in the audience, several of whom had queued up afterwards to have their books signed. The other authors sloped off before Rob had finished, leaving him at a loose end. He was relatively new to the festival scene; the book he was promoting was only his second, and he hadn’t managed to establish any friendships yet that went beyond an occasional drink in the hotel bar.
He ambled back from the theatre, aiming for nonchalance, and arrived at the hotel just as a group of guys were heading out. Half a dozen of them, early thirties to mid-fifties, full of good-natured swagger and nonsense, the way men get when they’re let loose from their pedestrian lives and feel the need to prove themselves. He recognised most of them as fellow writers but the only one he could actually put a name to was Jamie Cobain. In his early forties, he already had a career to envy. More than a dozen books published, three or four major awards, bestseller status at home and abroad. Rumour had it that his series detective was in development for TV, starring one of the craggy-faced, piercing-eyed heart-throbs of the moment.
Jamie Cobain caught sight of Rob and stopped in mid-stride. ‘It’s Rob, right?’ He turned to the others and said, ‘Guys, this is Rob Thomas. You know? Dereliction. Shortlisted for the Golden Thistle.’
A general rumble of acknowledgement, recognition, greetings. ‘Hi,’ Rob said, gripped by the shyness he always felt when confronted by a bunch of strangers.
‘We’re going for a curry, Rob.’
‘And a few sherbets,’ one of the others chipped in.
‘Are you spoken for, or do you want to join us?’ Jamie Cobain again.
Rob swallowed. ‘That’d be great, thanks.’ He tacked on to the edge of the crew and they hustled down the street, past the concrete monolith of Police Scotland, ending up in a time-warped Indian restaurant. Paper tablecloths, flock wallpaper, a list of different curries each with the option of chicken, lamb, beef or prawn. They could have been anywhere from Plymouth to Pitlochry, Rob thought. But definitely not the Punjab.
Not that it mattered. They were there for the beer and the chat. The curry was an incidental. Rob found himself sitting next to Jamie, surprised to be engaged in lively conversation with his new acquaintance. The table talk was mostly publishing gossip, lurid tales of bad behaviour among the crime writing community, gossip about who had fallen out with editor or agent, unlikely speculation about who might be shagging whom. A lot of laughter and anecdotage. But every now and then it would splinter into separate conversations. During one of those, Rob and Jamie discovered they lived not far from each other; Rob in his tiny flat in Leith, Jamie in the large detached house that his authorial success had brought him.
More to the point, they shared a common passion for chess. They’d both learned to play as schoolboys, Jamie at one of those Edinburgh private schools that trains its pupils to sound English, Rob at the local comprehensive in Dundee. But they’d both played at county level. Jamie was the elder by five years, otherwise they might have faced each other across the board as acned teenagers with bad haircuts. ‘Come round sometime, we’ll have a game,’ Jamie offered warmly as the waiter cleared the dishes and the writers ordered another round.
Rob didn’t think he meant it. He thought it was the kind of throwaway line that fills a space in the conversation. When they all staggered back to the hotel, genial and fuzzy with drink, Jamie was immediately swallowed up in a bigger crowd that included his agent and his editor. Forsaken now, Rob drifted to the fringes of the room, where a couple of intense readers collared him and insisted on a battery of detailed questions about his books and the earlier panel discussion. He didn’t see Jamie again all weekend until he was driving off in one of those ugly SUVs that rumbled through the cobbled streets of Edinburgh like an invading army. In spite of his enjoyment of their dinner encounter, Rob felt Jamie drop a little in his estimation at the sight.
But Jamie rose again a few days later when he emailed Rob via his website. ‘Mate, when are we going to get together over a board or two? I don’t know about you, but it’s a bitch to find a half-decent opponent.’
It was a friendly gesture, but at the same time, Rob recognised it was a gauntlet thrown down. Did he fancy his chances? Was he up to Jamie’s standards? Would it be a humiliating one-off, or would it be enough of a mutual challenge to occupy a regular slot in their lives?
There was only one way to find out.
2
The house impressed Rob. He’d assumed Jamie was making a good enough living, but he hadn’t expected it to provide a detached half-timbered monster that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the leafy lanes of the Home Counties. Its double gables looked out on the woodland of Ravelston Dykes like a pair of sarcastically raised eyebrows disdaining Rob’s approach.
The doorbell pealed the first four notes of the Westminster chimes. Through the stained-glass panels flanking the door he could see an indistinct figure approaching. The door swung open silently and Jamie Cobain broke into a grin. ‘Hey, you came, mate. I was afraid you might bottle it.’ He gestured expansively. ‘Welcome to the humble abode.’
Humble it certainly wasn’t, Rob thought. He followed Jamie down the tiled hallway and into a room towards the back of the house. He reckoned if a set designer had been told to produce a gentleman’s study, it would have resembled Jamie’s den. Bookshelves, a couple of dramatic Highland landscapes, a leather-topped desk and a pair of club chairs facing each other over a table with a marquetry chessboard, its dark squares black as ebony. The only object out of place was the silver MacBook Air folded shut on the desk.
‘Let me take your coat.’ Jamie fussed around, helping Rob out of his budget down jacket and disappearing with it. He returned with a tray – two decanters, two whisky tumblers, a jug of water. ‘Speyside or Islay?’ he said, putting the tray on the desk with a flourish.
‘Islay, with a splash.’
Jamie chuckled as he poured a dark whisky whose phenolic fumes Rob could smell across the room. ‘I expected as much. You don’t strike me as a man who likes a breakfast whisky at this time of day.’ It was a pitch-perfect performance; Rob recognised it as the very goal he was working towards. In Jamie’s case, though, it was the real thing. Being a writer wasn’t improbable for someone from his background. But Rob and Jamie both knew that people like him weren’t supposed to become writers, never mind successful ones.
A woman she took to be Bethan Carmichael was sitting on a polypropylene chair by the closed door. She was immersed in a paperback, a canvas tote bag leaning against one of the slender metal legs of the chair. A curtain of long dark hair obscured her face. Karen’s trainers made no sound as she approached and she was almost upon the woman before some instinct made her look up. Startled, she jumped to her feet, the legs of the chair screeching as she pushed it back. ‘God, you nearly gave me a heart attack!’ She clamped the hand that held the book to her chest. ‘Are you DCI Pirie?’
Karen registered the book title. Around the World in 80 Trees; appropriate enough for someone whose job depended upon the death of trees. She held out her ID. ‘That’s me. Bethan Carmichael, I presume?’ She looked more like a model for a high-end clothes store. Sahara, or Oska, maybe. Unstructured linen, loose trousers, a jacket like a French labourer’s. Her face was all planes and angles; not exactly attractive, but striking, Karen thought.
Carmichael bent to pick up the tote bag and hesitated. ‘I’ve done what you asked,’ she said. ‘But if you think this is going anywhere, I should warn you that there are two whole archive boxes that date from roughly the same period. There are all sorts of scribbles on pieces of paper, some of them possibly related to this material. You may find that you need to go through them with a fine-tooth comb. If so, we’ll have to make special arrangements.’
‘What sort of special arrangements? Why can’t we just take them away? Or have them copied?’
Carmichael rolled her eyes. ‘Because they’ve not been catalogued and assessed by a fully qualified archivist. We’ve only had Jake Stein’s papers for a few months. We’ve not had time to fully prepare the archive. If you did want to go down that road, I’d have to arrange for one of your people to be given access to a room and locked in while they were reading through the material. I’m really not sure even that would be lawful.’ As with so many in these terrified times, her fear had translated itself to hostility.
Karen shrugged. ‘In spite of the pandemic, we’re still supposed to serve and protect. And that means carrying out investigations. This particular inquiry might be a cold case, but if Lara Hardie was murdered, there’s somebody out there who’s killed at least once and might well do so again. It becomes a public protection issue, Bethan. If there’s a can to be carried, I’ll cheerfully do that. But we’ll burn that bridge if we come to it. In the meantime, let us look at what you’ve got for us and we’ll take it from there.’ She held out her hand and Carmichael reluctantly handed over the bag.
‘Let me know how you get on,’ she said.
Karen dipped her head in acknowledgement. ‘When I can. Thanks for this.’ She turned to walk away, then swung back as a thought occurred to her. ‘Who delivered this material to you?’
‘It was part of Jake Stein’s estate,’ she replied. ‘It came from the lawyers who were handling the probate. I think they’d consulted Stein’s ex-wife; there were probably considerations of privacy and Stein’s own conditions to be met.’
‘So someone could have weeded out material they didn’t want anyone else to see?’
‘It’s always a possibility. An ex-wife might well pull letters or notes that showed her in an unfavourable light.’
Karen tutted. ‘Great. Oh well, we’ll have to make the best of what we’ve got.’ She walked off, wishing she could head to the nearest café and dive into the text. But the nearest café, ironically one of Hamish’s Perk chain, was closed, its baristas repurposed as delivery boys. She increased her pace as she pushed on up and over the ridge of the Canongate, hardly able to contain her impatience. In the meantime, she could set Jason to work.
He answered his phone with a cheerful, ‘Hi, boss. So, was Meera right? Are we cooking with gas?’
‘Too early to say, Jason. Daisy and I are going to wade through the manuscript and that will give us a better idea.’
‘Oh. Right.’ He sounded disappointed.
‘In the meantime, I’ve got a job for you.’
‘Oh. Right.’ This time, he resembled a dog that’s been shown the treat.
‘I want you to get online and research Jake Stein. There’ll be a lot of interviews and probably YouTube videos. Plus you’ll need to dig down deep into the socials – Faceplant, Twatter, Slapchat—’
‘That’s not what they’re called, boss.’
Karen rolled her eyes. ‘I want a full timeline of the man’s life and career. See how much you can get for a briefing, OK?’
‘How are we going to do a briefing?’
‘It’ll have to be on the Zoom,’ she sighed. ‘So you’ll need to get up in time to comb your hair.’ She ended the call and forged on. Maybe this was something and nothing. But that was often the case with leads on cold cases. With a little digging in the right place, the unpromising could reveal a hidden path through the thicket of information. And when it came to finding the right place to dig, Karen Pirie was definitely more bloodhound than box-ticker.
That didn’t mean she was optimistic that they’d been handed a revelation that would open the Lara Hardie case like a can-opener. Chances were, this would turn out to be nothing more than a couple of coincidences. But that would also be OK. Karen could run it as if it were the real thing, making it a training and team-building exercise for Jason and Daisy. That was just what they needed. The one case where Daisy had been seconded to the HCU hadn’t told Karen enough about her skills and her practices. And Jason needed reassurance that the arrival of a new team member one rank up from him wasn’t a threat to his standing with Karen. Walking through this odd situation might prove the perfect piece of serendipity.
Either way, it wouldn’t hurt. And it would be more fun than a thousand-piece jigsaw.
6
The Lara Hardie case file contained few surprises, Daisy thought. There was a familiar pattern to this kind of disappearance. The initial report, from friends or family; the excluding of the trifecta of usual reasons – running away for love; ditto for escape; depression leading to suicide. Then the attempt to fill in the hours leading to the vanishing, the door-to-door, the questioning of anyone who knew the misper well. Then the absurd false leads thrown out by the internet and seized on by the conspiracy theorists. It wasn’t easy to disappear without trace these days. Not with CCTV and digital footprints. But Lara had managed it. She’d left the flat she shared with two other students one Monday evening almost a year ago, saying she was going to the library. She never arrived.
She wasn’t in a relationship. Her studies were going well. She wasn’t the life and soul of the party, but she wasn’t someone who provoked antagonism. There was no obvious reason for her to leave her life. One of the flatmates had said she thought Lara had an air of suppressed excitement that didn’t fit with a trip to the library.
There was one distinctive element to this particular disappearance. Lara had suffered since childhood with atonic epileptic seizures. Every few months, she’d experience a moment where all her muscles stopped working. If she was standing or walking, she’d hit the deck. If she was sitting down, she’d slump forward. The last time it had happened, she’d been sitting at a desk in the library and her head had smacked into it with such force she’d ended up with a goose egg on her forehead. But suffering such damage had been rare. Usually, Lara recovered fully almost instantaneously, often not even realising she’d had an episode. She made no fuss about her ailment. She took regular medication; the only deprivation she’d ever commented on to her flatmates was she could neither drive nor cycle.
The media, both news and social, speculated that she’d experienced a seizure that had allowed a passing predator to exploit her illness. No matter how often medical experts expressed frustration at this misrepresentation of her illness, the inaccuracies persisted.
There had been a search, of course. Police dogs, volunteers, the usual. Nothing had turned up. There were some printouts from online news outlets, ranging from WHERE IS PRETTY BLONDE LARA? to EDINBURGH STUDENT GOES MISSING. Always the same, Daisy thought. Blonde white lassie = screaming headlines. Anybody else = a few paragraphs. Nevertheless, it hadn’t made any difference. Lara had slid out of sight without a trace.
Finally, the TV appeal. Lara’s mum and dad were joined by her elder sister, stoic at first, then tearful. Have you seen Lara . . . if you’re keeping Lara . . . Lara, we love you . . . Lara come home. Heartbreaking, but this time, as was usually the case, fruitless. Unless you counted the dozens of time-wasting ‘sightings’.
Daisy was close to the end of the Lara Hardie case file when Karen burst through the door, out of breath from hurrying up three flights of stairs. Daisy pushed her notes to one side and stood up expectantly. ‘Did you get it?’
Karen waved the bag, triumphant as a successful bargain hunter at the sales. ‘I did.’ She moved the empty file box to the floor and spread out her spoils. Two disappointingly scant piles of paper and a memory stick. ‘I managed to keep my hands off all the way home.’ She sounded pleased with herself, and Daisy couldn’t blame her. She’d have squatted in the nearest doorway and stolen a quick look if it had been her.
Daisy approached and they each picked up a set of photocopies. ‘Tell me we get to read it now,’ she said.
‘No reason to hold back,’ Karen said, moving to one of the comfortable armchairs that flanked the fireplace. She tucked a pencil behind her ear and began to read.
THE VANISHING OF LAUREL OLIVER
Part One
Prologue
He really believed it was a madcap game. A joke. A dare, played out between old friends. Why would anyone imagine otherwise? Writing twisted scenarios didn’t mean he believed they happened in the real world. Strangers on a Train had the brilliant premise of two unconnected people swapping murders, but he didn’t believe anybody would be daft enough to try it for real. Not even a card-carrying psychopath like the character in Highsmith’s novel.
It had genuinely never crossed his mind that his best friend would actually commit a murder solely to demonstrate that the perfect crime was possible, and that he was capable of committing it. Not until he had to deal with the revelation that there was now a dead body in his garage.
1
Jamie Cobain and Rob Thomas had met in a curry house in Perth. The one in Scotland, not Australia. They were both there for the crime writing festival the city had hosted for the previous decade. Jamie had never quite worked out why Perth ended up as the venue for the festival. As far as he knew, its only real claim to criminal fame was the maximum security prison celebrated in song by the late Dundee bard Michael Marra in his ‘Letter from Perth’. Other than that, the only reason he could think of for choosing Perth was that it was well served by the motorway network, and by direct trains from Edinburgh and Glasgow. And there was the sleeper to and from London, which was always a consideration when it came to persuading the metropolitans to reach escape velocity from their orbital motorway.
Rob had appeared on the last panel of the Saturday afternoon on the thorny subject of Mad or Bad: Dangerous to Know. Alongside a criminal barrister, a former priest and an escaped wife and mother (her words, not Rob’s), he’d explained his views on why people do the terrible things his imagination conjured up. There were a couple of hundred in the audience, several of whom had queued up afterwards to have their books signed. The other authors sloped off before Rob had finished, leaving him at a loose end. He was relatively new to the festival scene; the book he was promoting was only his second, and he hadn’t managed to establish any friendships yet that went beyond an occasional drink in the hotel bar.
He ambled back from the theatre, aiming for nonchalance, and arrived at the hotel just as a group of guys were heading out. Half a dozen of them, early thirties to mid-fifties, full of good-natured swagger and nonsense, the way men get when they’re let loose from their pedestrian lives and feel the need to prove themselves. He recognised most of them as fellow writers but the only one he could actually put a name to was Jamie Cobain. In his early forties, he already had a career to envy. More than a dozen books published, three or four major awards, bestseller status at home and abroad. Rumour had it that his series detective was in development for TV, starring one of the craggy-faced, piercing-eyed heart-throbs of the moment.
Jamie Cobain caught sight of Rob and stopped in mid-stride. ‘It’s Rob, right?’ He turned to the others and said, ‘Guys, this is Rob Thomas. You know? Dereliction. Shortlisted for the Golden Thistle.’
A general rumble of acknowledgement, recognition, greetings. ‘Hi,’ Rob said, gripped by the shyness he always felt when confronted by a bunch of strangers.
‘We’re going for a curry, Rob.’
‘And a few sherbets,’ one of the others chipped in.
‘Are you spoken for, or do you want to join us?’ Jamie Cobain again.
Rob swallowed. ‘That’d be great, thanks.’ He tacked on to the edge of the crew and they hustled down the street, past the concrete monolith of Police Scotland, ending up in a time-warped Indian restaurant. Paper tablecloths, flock wallpaper, a list of different curries each with the option of chicken, lamb, beef or prawn. They could have been anywhere from Plymouth to Pitlochry, Rob thought. But definitely not the Punjab.
Not that it mattered. They were there for the beer and the chat. The curry was an incidental. Rob found himself sitting next to Jamie, surprised to be engaged in lively conversation with his new acquaintance. The table talk was mostly publishing gossip, lurid tales of bad behaviour among the crime writing community, gossip about who had fallen out with editor or agent, unlikely speculation about who might be shagging whom. A lot of laughter and anecdotage. But every now and then it would splinter into separate conversations. During one of those, Rob and Jamie discovered they lived not far from each other; Rob in his tiny flat in Leith, Jamie in the large detached house that his authorial success had brought him.
More to the point, they shared a common passion for chess. They’d both learned to play as schoolboys, Jamie at one of those Edinburgh private schools that trains its pupils to sound English, Rob at the local comprehensive in Dundee. But they’d both played at county level. Jamie was the elder by five years, otherwise they might have faced each other across the board as acned teenagers with bad haircuts. ‘Come round sometime, we’ll have a game,’ Jamie offered warmly as the waiter cleared the dishes and the writers ordered another round.
Rob didn’t think he meant it. He thought it was the kind of throwaway line that fills a space in the conversation. When they all staggered back to the hotel, genial and fuzzy with drink, Jamie was immediately swallowed up in a bigger crowd that included his agent and his editor. Forsaken now, Rob drifted to the fringes of the room, where a couple of intense readers collared him and insisted on a battery of detailed questions about his books and the earlier panel discussion. He didn’t see Jamie again all weekend until he was driving off in one of those ugly SUVs that rumbled through the cobbled streets of Edinburgh like an invading army. In spite of his enjoyment of their dinner encounter, Rob felt Jamie drop a little in his estimation at the sight.
But Jamie rose again a few days later when he emailed Rob via his website. ‘Mate, when are we going to get together over a board or two? I don’t know about you, but it’s a bitch to find a half-decent opponent.’
It was a friendly gesture, but at the same time, Rob recognised it was a gauntlet thrown down. Did he fancy his chances? Was he up to Jamie’s standards? Would it be a humiliating one-off, or would it be enough of a mutual challenge to occupy a regular slot in their lives?
There was only one way to find out.
2
The house impressed Rob. He’d assumed Jamie was making a good enough living, but he hadn’t expected it to provide a detached half-timbered monster that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the leafy lanes of the Home Counties. Its double gables looked out on the woodland of Ravelston Dykes like a pair of sarcastically raised eyebrows disdaining Rob’s approach.
The doorbell pealed the first four notes of the Westminster chimes. Through the stained-glass panels flanking the door he could see an indistinct figure approaching. The door swung open silently and Jamie Cobain broke into a grin. ‘Hey, you came, mate. I was afraid you might bottle it.’ He gestured expansively. ‘Welcome to the humble abode.’
Humble it certainly wasn’t, Rob thought. He followed Jamie down the tiled hallway and into a room towards the back of the house. He reckoned if a set designer had been told to produce a gentleman’s study, it would have resembled Jamie’s den. Bookshelves, a couple of dramatic Highland landscapes, a leather-topped desk and a pair of club chairs facing each other over a table with a marquetry chessboard, its dark squares black as ebony. The only object out of place was the silver MacBook Air folded shut on the desk.
‘Let me take your coat.’ Jamie fussed around, helping Rob out of his budget down jacket and disappearing with it. He returned with a tray – two decanters, two whisky tumblers, a jug of water. ‘Speyside or Islay?’ he said, putting the tray on the desk with a flourish.
‘Islay, with a splash.’
Jamie chuckled as he poured a dark whisky whose phenolic fumes Rob could smell across the room. ‘I expected as much. You don’t strike me as a man who likes a breakfast whisky at this time of day.’ It was a pitch-perfect performance; Rob recognised it as the very goal he was working towards. In Jamie’s case, though, it was the real thing. Being a writer wasn’t improbable for someone from his background. But Rob and Jamie both knew that people like him weren’t supposed to become writers, never mind successful ones.
