Past Lying, page 7
‘Would he not have destroyed the manuscript, if that was what happened?’
Karen shrugged. ‘That might have been what he intended. Only his body let him down before he could do that.’ She sighed. ‘Just another one of the great unanswerable questions that plague the cold case investigator.’
‘I don’t suppose there was anything suspicious about his death?’
Karen shook her head. ‘There were no red flags at the time. I don’t think you can actually provoke a brain aneurysm.’ She reached for her phone and googled. Daisy waited patiently, knowing better than to interrupt. Karen looked up, shaking her head. ‘Apparently not. High blood pressure, a shit-ton of cocaine, but even then you’d have to have a natural weakness. And I don’t think he could have afforded a serious coke habit towards the end of his life. Looks like it was just bad timing.’
‘What I find interesting,’ Daisy said slowly, ‘is how self-critical he is. That is, if the character of Jamie is really how Stein saw himself. He’s not going out of his way to make us feel sympathy for him.’
‘Good point. But maybe we’re not meant to like him at this point? He could have been planning to turn Jamie into the hero later on?’
‘I suppose . . . ’ Daisy didn’t sound convinced. ‘More likely, he just lacked insight into how he comes off.’
Karen grimaced. ‘He wouldn’t be the first man to suffer from that. But we might be wrong about this whole set-up. He could have been playing with an idea inspired by Lara’s disappearance. Maybe he was trying it out for size. And it didn’t fit. Let’s not lose sight of that.’
6
‘So, tell me about this perfect crime,’ Rob said two weeks later, pouring a liberal Scotch for Jamie.
Jamie gave him a sly look. ‘What? And give you a solid gold plot for free? Do you think I came up the Firth of Forth on a bike?’
Rob shrugged. ‘We write very different kinds of book, Jamie. Even if I did steal your plot, the end result wouldn’t be anything like yours.’
Jamie, in benevolent mood after beating Rob soundly with a twist on the Scotch Gambit, acknowledged the truth of the comment by raising his glass in a toast. ‘True. So, the bad guy is a poet. The victim is a student who comes to one of his readings and lingers at the end of the signing queue. She confesses she’s struggling with her own poetry. He’s been looking for someone like her for a long time. So he arranges to meet her, he kills her, then he dumps the body in his patsy’s garden. Then he stands back and waits for the right time to betray him.’
‘That doesn’t sound very perfect to me,’ Rob said. ‘There’d be evidence galore, surely?’
Jamie tapped the side of his nose. ‘I’ve worked it all out, Rob. Every last detail.’
‘But why? What’s your killer’s motivation?’
Jamie savoured a mouthful of Scotch. ‘The dish best eaten cold.’
‘Revenge? Revenge for what?’
Jamie shrugged. ‘The usual. You know. Betrayal.’
Rob felt the inward shiver of someone walking over his grave. Surely Jamie couldn’t know about him and Rachel? They’d both understood from the very start that there would be consequences for both of them if Jamie found out about their relationship. He had a very clear idea of what belonged to him; he had been genuinely hurt by the divorce and outraged at what he saw as a deeply unjust settlement. He’d raged for months about having to surrender the assets he’d worked so hard for. Rachel was a qualified lawyer; they could have been equal partners in building their life. But she’d chosen to go part-time, to contribute nothing to the household economy except cooking for their dinner guests. Deliveroo could manage that almost as well without demanding half his home.
Falling in love with his chess partner’s wife had been so far off his agenda that Rob didn’t notice it was happening. That first time Rachel had cooked for him had felt special, it was true, but only because it had been so long since anyone had shown him any culinary care. He’d asked for her recipe for the Roscoff onions, and that simple act had apparently sparked a fire in Rachel, accustomed for so long to being taken for granted.
The next time they’d met had been happenstance. He’d walked up to Valvona & Crolla at the top of Leith Walk for some of their exquisite nduja and he’d been diverted by a shelf of cannoli. A voice at his shoulder startled him. ‘You know you want to,’ in low tones. He swivelled to come face to face with Rachel.
He flushed and said, ‘The trouble with cannoli is that one’s never enough.’
‘Like so many of the good things in life.’ Rachel’s tone was rueful but her smile was playful. ‘Have you got time for a coffee? Or are you in one of those short breaks between frantic creativity?’
It was true that the walk up the hill to the Italian grocery had shaken loose a path through a thorny conversational thicket between two of his characters. But that could wait. Even if the idea evaporated before he got back to his keyboard, he knew he wouldn’t care. Ideas were cheap; spending time with a woman like Rachel was not.
This time, they talked about books, about febrile Scottish politics, about what was coming up at the Film House. Jamie barely figured in the conversation. And the next time they’d played chess, Jamie had said nothing about their meeting. Now, thinking about it, Rob had a fleeting moment of unease. Had that been a test? Had Rachel told her husband and was Rob’s silence indicative of guilt? It hadn’t occurred to him at the time; rather, he’d assumed it had been so trivial an encounter that Rachel didn’t consider it worth mentioning.
But now? Now he was being paranoid, he told himself. Because Rachel had felt that same spark that had lit up his day. She’d since told him so. That was why she’d said nothing to Jamie and also why she’d called him a few days later. ‘Jamie has suddenly decided he’s going to New York for that stupid awards ceremony. The one he’s convinced he’s got no chance of winning?’ She sighed. ‘Apparently, he needs to be in the room, to show his face. And I’ve got a lobster in the fridge that needs to be eaten tomorrow. I don’t suppose you feel like sharing it?’
The uptick in his heart rate had nothing to do with the lobster and everything to do with the prospect of seeing Rachel. ‘Hmm,’ he mused. ‘How were you thinking of cooking it?’ They both knew the answer didn’t matter. She could have placed a plate of beans on toast in front of him and they’d still have ended up in bed afterwards. In the spare room, obviously. There was never anything tacky about Rachel.
Rob felt Rachel was who he had been waiting for all his life but had never quite believed he’d find. He’d had girlfriends, but none of them had ever made him feel that he’d want to spend the rest of the year, never mind the rest of his life with them. With Rachel, he felt completed in a way that he thought was only a fiction. The truly astonishing thing was that she claimed she felt the same way about him. That was harder to credit, but he was reluctantly coming round to believing her.
Of course, keeping their relationship under wraps did spice it with risk, giving it a frisson of excitement that might not have persisted so strongly had they been out in the open. But Rachel was adamant, even after the divorce, that they keep it from Jamie. ‘You have no idea how dangerous he is,’ she’d said.
‘But it’s over. You’re divorced. He’s got no claim on you.’
‘He still says he loves me. That he’d get back together in a heartbeat.’
‘He’ll just have to get over it.’
Rachel had turned to face him, her expression grave, her dark eyes troubled. ‘Rob, he will destroy you. Trust me, he’ll make it his life’s work to bring you down.’
‘He can’t do that.’ Rob stroked her tousled hair back from her forehead. ‘He’s got no credit in the bank in the crime writing world. Nobody would take him seriously.’
She shook her head. ‘You underestimate the power of social media. Ripped out of context, a throwaway joke can be turned toxic in the time it takes me to tell you this. Anybody who’s ever begrudged your success can be weaponised. He’ll pretend you’re the reason our marriage went south, even though he had no idea it was happening. He’ll turn his dirty little affairs into a response to my infidelity. Remember the shock of Gala Faraday’s slap? You think you’re beyond provocation, Rob. But you’re not.’
He pushed himself into a sitting position, the pillows scrunched into the small of his back. ‘So, what? We skulk around in the dark forever? We let him win?’
‘Not forever, my love.’ She moved confidently to straddle him. ‘I know the way his mind twists. As soon as he finds another woman he wants to make his property, he’ll lose all interest in me. I’ll be the one who failed, you’ll be the mug who got stuck with her.’ She leaned into him, lips caressing the line of his jaw. ‘And it’s not like we can only be together when he’s out of town,’ she added. ‘We just have to be private.’
All of this flashed across Rob’s mind in seconds. None of it showed on his face, he was certain. He’d perfected his blank face in poker schools at college; it had been one of the ways he’d managed to keep his head above the financial waves. He’d reawakened the old skills at US mystery conventions, where the American top dogs played late-night games for high stakes. He’d never come away from the table with less than he’d started with.
‘Betrayal? Lots of possibilities there,’ he said. ‘Professional double-cross, marital infidelity, sibling rivalry, inheritance that doesn’t go the way everyone expects, plagiarism. You’re spoilt for choice.’
‘Oh, I ‘ve already decided. I told you, it’s going like a train.’ The old Jamie was back – smugly confident and untouchable. ‘I’m all set. All I have to do is the final checks. Run a dress rehearsal.’
‘What do you mean, a dress rehearsal?’
‘The perfect crime. I just need a run-through to make sure it works.’
This time, Rob’s poker face failed him. ‘You’re not going to kill someone, are you?’
Jamie roared with laughter. ‘You are so easy, Rob. What do you take me for?’ He finished his drink and stood up. ‘Wait and see, mate. This will blow them away.’
7
Karen paused in her reading. ‘So now the wife swims into focus. Bethan Carmichael mentioned Stein’s ex-wife when she was explaining about the archive. It didn’t seem important at the time. But now . . . What do we know about Rosalind Stein?’
Daisy scrambled back through her notebook. ‘Like the book says, she’s a lawyer. Probate and wills. There’s no personal stuff on Google, except that she divorced Stein after an “incident” at a publishing event. She’s never given an interview as far as I could see.’
‘So we’ve got no idea if she’s having an affair or has ever had an affair, with Ross McEwen or anybody else?’
Daisy shook her head. ‘If she has, she’s kept it well out of the headlines.’
‘Maybe she was as scared of her husband’s reaction as the fictional wife.’ Karen sighed. This was growing more complicated by the minute. ‘Or maybe that’s what we’re being set up to think. It’s still possible that we’re being strung along here, that there never was an affair.’
‘So what do we do?’
Karen ran a frustrated hand through her hair. It was flimsy, but she kept telling herself it was something for them to get their teeth into during these strange disconnected lockdown days. She was certainly learning how Daisy’s mind worked; she thought she was beginning to draw her into the tight-knit unit of the HCU. ‘Let’s just move on very carefully. Take it at face value but interrogate it as we go along. First, how the hell did Jake Stein know about the beginnings of the affair between his wife and Rob McEwen? Surely neither of them would have told him, since they were determined to keep it secret?’
Daisy pondered. ‘Well, if we’re going to say for the sake of argument that this account maps on to reality then obviously Stein found out about the affair at some point. That’s why he’s got it in for Ross McEwen.’
‘But how could he have known all the details of how they got together?’
‘I just assumed he’d made it up.’ Daisy looked perplexed. ‘It’s fiction, boss. Even if it’s rooted in truth, he’s got to put stuff on the page he can’t know. Surely he would have known his wife well enough to understand what would excite her about a man? After all, they’d been in love once. He might even have used their own early connection and pasted it on to how he imagined Ross and Ros got together.’
‘Wouldn’t that have been a kind of torture?’
Daisy shrugged. ‘Writers do it all the time. They give their own experiences to their characters, or they nick them off their friends. All it would have taken would have been somebody in his circle complaining about how rubbish their kitchen was compared to Stein’s. That’d set him off down that road.’
It made sense, and it made Karen even more glad she’d never considered a career where you constantly had to pick the scabs of your past mistakes. She pondered what she’d read, and wondered once more what it was that had set alarm bells ringing for Meera Reddy. So far, what they had was pitifully thin. The chances of this going somewhere useful were diminishing by the hour.
‘I’m not really seeing anything of interest to us yet.’ She registered the flash of relief in Daisy’s eyes. ‘I tried a Jake Stein a couple of years ago, but I struggled to get past the first chapter – cardboard cut-out blonde with zero personality who’s obviously going to get dead, you know the kind of thing. I only picked it up because it was the one book in English in the hotel where I was staying.’ She scoffed. ‘I have the same issue here if I’ve forgotten to bring a book with me.’
‘He doesn’t read much fiction, does he?’ Daisy scanned the motivational paperbacks and the business manuals that filled Hamish’s bookshelves.
‘So what do you think’s going on here? You’re the one with the degree.’
Daisy shrugged. ‘French and Legal Studies doesn’t make me a literary critic. I read the same kind of thing as you do, I reckon. Like I said, I got sucked in once and read three on the bounce – he was a good storyteller but I started to feel uncomfortable about his female characters.’
Karen prodded the pages with her finger. ‘This is quite clever, though. He writes in a way that makes it feel smarter than it really is. You get propelled along and don’t stop to question how likely it all is. A cut above genre, kind of. Does that make sense?’
‘It’s something to do with the syntax, I think. The sentence structure.’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know what “syntax” means, Daisy.’ Karen caught herself sounding grumpy. It was always the same, waiting for a case to start moving. Even worse when there might not be a case at all.
Daisy cut her eyes at her boss. ‘There’s one wee thing that did strike me. And I don’t know whether it means anything . . . ’
Karen perked up. ‘Don’t be shy, Daisy.’
‘This is supposed to be a first draft, yeah?’
‘I think so. I mean, there’s not enough of it for it to be finished.’
Daisy thumbed through the pages she’d read. ‘I’d have thought there would be scribbles all over it. Changing words, cutting bits out, adding bits. But this looks pretty polished.’
‘Mibbes he does all the revisions on the screen and doesn’t print it out till he’s happy with it?’
‘That’s probably it.’ Daisy seemed unconvinced.
‘The trouble is, we don’t know enough about this. Is it really the first draft of something Stein was planning to publish? Or is he just playing around with an idea? Was he going to rework it to make it more anonymous? So it wouldn’t read like him confessing? Mibbes he had another version in mind where Ross McEwen was pointed to as the murderer? And if Stein was planning to publish it, why didn’t he finish it? Was he still working on it or had he dumped it? The time frame in the novel probably doesn’t correspond to real life either. Like the song says, more questions than answers . . . ’ Karen let out a sigh that seemed to come from her boots. ‘Either way, we shouldn’t take anything it says for gospel.’
Daisy gave her boss an anxious look, clearly lost for a response. When in doubt, she knew there was one way to go. ‘Do you want a coffee or will we just crack on?’
Karen picked up the next bundle of manuscript. ‘Onwards. Save the coffee for a reward at the end. Let’s see whether we can find whatever it is that’s ringing the librarian’s bell.’
THE VANISHING OF LAUREL OLIVER
Part Two
7
Cognitive dissonance. That was the posh term for it, and it was driving Jamie Cobain tonto. On the one hand, he’d become addicted to going head-to-head over the chessboard with Rob Thomas. Those nights were the only oasis of pure pleasure in this life he’d been shunted into. On the other hand, he hated Rob Thomas with every fibre of his being. Rob was fucking his wi— his ex-wife. Had been for more than a year now. Rob was the reason he’d not been able to salvage something from the wreckage. She’d only jumped ship when she finally thought she’d found a lifeboat. And he still loved her. The tension between love and hate was costing him sleep and any possibility of pleasure.
The thunderbolt realisation of the only resolution for this had come out of the blue a few weeks ago while he’d been watching the own-brand budget macaroni cheese slowly spinning in the microwave. He had to destroy Rob. In the process, he’d probably royally fuck up Rachel. But maybe out of the wreckage, they’d find a way to get back together. OK, somebody would have to die. But you can’t make an omelette without breaking some chicken’s heart.
What was that saying about the cobbler’s kids being the worst shod? There should be a modern version about the tech-savvy crime writers being the easiest to spy on. Rob and Rachel thought they’d been so careful, sneaking around the city under cover of darkness. She’d even disabled the ‘find my phone’ feature on her iPhone. It never occurred to her to check her car for a tracker. Or inside the lining of her four favourite handbags. Mind you, she wouldn’t have been any the wiser if she had. She wouldn’t know a tracker from a tracksuit.
