Absolution (26 page)

She was going to ask Wyngate to track Trude. And she wasn’t even going to ask permission, in case McAlpine said no. She flicked open her mobile.

Wingnut, can you do your computer magic for me? See what you can come up with on Trude Swann – that’s with two
n’s.
And get back to me, before anyone else.’ She snapped her phone shut. In today’s world, Trude’s footprints would be visible in the electronic snow. Somewhere.

The cow snorted warm air from her nostrils; Costello was boring her. So she said goodbye and slid from the fence. She had an appointment with Nicholson in an hour’s time, and she was looking forward to it like toothache.

The flat was crammed full of furniture, most of it far too big for such a small room, remnants of a life in a larger, grander home. Former DI David Nicholson walked back into the living room, pushing a leather chair to one side. Costello had the feeling she was not exactly welcome. The big, well-worn chair had been right in front of the widescreen television; a half-drunk cup of tea was on the floor, with two ginger nuts on a side plate beside it. She had interrupted him watching the cricket highlights from Australia on Sky.

Folded over on the seat was that morning’s
Herald.
Costello could see Lynzi and Elizabeth Jane looking out at her in black-and-white. Arlene was in colour.

‘You’re looking well. Retirement suits you,’ she said in a voice she hoped sounded genuine.

He didn’t answer but walked into the tiny kitchen, holding on to the doorframe, shuffling his feet as he went, his slippers not quite clearing the carpet. He had aged badly; life in the retirement apartment did not suit him. She saw a few small plastic brown pill bottles on a side table. Maybe he wasn’t keeping too grand.

‘I’ll just stick the kettle on.’

‘Lovely,’ said Costello through the door. She pulled a chair out from the dining table, turning it so it faced the leather one, wishing he would come back and open the window or turn the fire off or something.

Nicholson appeared with a china cup and more ginger nuts. ‘So what can I do for you, DS Costello? What’s your first name again, petal?’

‘Costello. I just get called Costello. I’m here about Sean McTiernan.’ She had already explained all this on the phone. He handed her the cup, his clammy hand clasped over hers, and she shivered despite the heat, relieved that Batten was sure Christopher Robin was a young man.

‘So!’ she said enthusiastically. ‘You were quite famous for the work you did on this case. Anything you can tell me?’

‘Can I ask why?’

‘Well, it’s all background stuff, anybody who’s recently come out of jail, anybody with a criminal history involving violence… of any kind.’ Her voice trailed off.
You were in the force,
she wanted to say,
you know the score.

‘For these Crucifixion Killings?’

What else?
Tes.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so, my dear.’

For a minute she thought he was refusing to help. He sipped his tea, looking out of the window as though she didn’t exist. All his annoying habits were coming back to her now. She ploughed on. Why do you say that?’

He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t fit.’

‘I’ve seen the pictures of Steele’s body. McTiernan mashed it to a pulp.’

‘Steele was an animal.’

‘Did you ever find a history between McTiernan and Steele? Any connection?’

‘My dear, McTiernan confessed. We didn’t look for a reason why.’

‘But you didn’t accept it, did you?’ She stated it as fact.

Nicholson’s mouth moved on the side of his cup, his thick feminine lips incongruous with his thin face. ‘No, we didn’t accept it. But you can’t find what ain’t there. Malkie liked little boys. He was a predator, a paedophile. Sean was a good-looking wee boy; maybe there was no more to it than that.’

‘But you didn’t accept it?’ Costello persevered.

‘He confessed the minute he walked in the door,’ Nicholson said, with some irritation. ‘Look, I’ll tell you what happened that night, as far as I remember it. McTiernan is a shrewd young man, very shrewd indeed.’ Costello felt as though she was back at school. ‘He served four years – ’

‘Three years and six months,’ corrected Costello to show she was on top of things.

‘Instead of life. For an assault like that, he could have gone down for life, recommended twenty. But he engineered it. It looked like culp. hom, if he was unlucky. If he was lucky, he’d get off on a plea of self-defence. And he can’t be tried again. Small price to pay to get rid of somebody.’

‘So there must have been some history between them? A reason to get rid of him?’ Costello’s mind was leaping forward now.

‘Nothing that we could find. No connection to anybody, not anybody who was – anybody. There was a lot of stuff that didn’t make sense. Not then. Not now.’

‘For instance?’ Costello persisted.

‘First thing is that Steele was a hitman for Arthur Laing, a really nasty piece of work. You won’t remember, too young, but in those days Glasgow hadn’t yet moved out the hands of gangs and into the drug war. The crime wasn’t nice, but at least it was logical, no drug-crazed nutters winding the police up.’

Costello held her tongue. She’d never given any credence to the view that the streets were safer when the Krays were alive, but she knew that was exactly where the conversation was going. ‘So what did they do, Laing’s lot? The usual? Protection? Prostitution? Robbery with menaces?’

‘And a touch of high-level reset, stolen stuff from abroad mostly. And it was lucrative; the European Union was making international crime easier. Ask any of the Customs and Excise boys. The situation was starting to get out of control, so they set up a special squad with the Inland Revenue to try to get him. Losing Steele hit Laing hard, really hard. And it caused a vacuum that we could take advantage of.
Did
take advantage of. But McTiernan? Entrapment, hen. That’s what I thought.’

‘Yes?’ said Costello encouragingly.

‘Malkie was purporting to be a football scout. Sean, from all accounts, was not happy about meeting him, not happy at all.’ His eyes drifted to the Test Match. ‘He put a chisel through his hand the day he and Steele were supposed to meet, so he could engineer a rearrangement of time and
place. Steele was not going to be suspicious of a wee guy like Sean. He walked up that lane like a lamb to the slaughter, and good riddance. And Sean had prepared for it all. He’d been down at his local skip that morning dumping a whole lot of rubbish, with his hand full of stitches, I may add. He emptied his flat, and when the flat was broken into, he didn’t report it. He was in the process of buying a house and then pulled out the minute he’d killed Steele. I don’t believe for a minute he ever swallowed the football-scout story.’ Nicholson swung in his seat. ‘McTiernan was not stupid. He planned Steele’s killing, I’m sure of it. We all thought he planned to do a runner. He’d even bought hair dye to disguise himself,’ Nicholson snorted. ‘Then he changed his mind.’

‘Where was this flat?’ She knew from the files but decided to check his memory.

‘In Ayr, Petrie Street in Ayr.’ Nicholson was right about that. ‘He’d lived there for about a year.’

‘On his own?’

‘So he said.’ His attention was back on the Test Match again.

‘And the house? The house he was thinking about buying?’ Costello was scribbling. They were beyond the contents of the file now.

‘A big house, right on the coast, below Culzean Castle.’

‘That’s the middle of nowhere.’

‘Yeah, too big for one person, and no place for a young man on his own, miles from the nearest pub.’ Nicholson shook his head. ‘Bought a puppy one day and apparently dumped it three days later. Nice. Expensive it was, one of those husky things.’ The lips were working their way round the rim of the cup.

‘Where did the money come from? To buy the house?’

‘I told you, he never bought the house. He thought about it and pulled out. Listen, hen, Malkie Steele was an evil bastard, better dead. Young McTiernan did us all a favour. You think we were going to waste police time looking any further than we had to?’

Costello decided on a different tack. ‘Did you ever meet a girl called Trude?’

‘She never visited him when he was being held, or in court, or in prison. He was an attractive boy, he had plenty of women coming and going. But none of them was this Trude.’ Costello smiled her granny-sweet smile, willing him to talk. ‘I saw him in jail, two months after he’d been sent down, and he was already changing, for the worse. I do remember him asking how my wife was, though.’ Costello followed the line of Nicholson’s gaze to a photograph of him and his wife, golfing. ‘But she’d died the previous month. The week I finally got my retirement, can you believe it? They’d kept me hanging on all that time and what for? Another three quid on my pension.’ He was bitter.

‘Did Sean know your wife, then?’

‘He knew she was ill and asked after her,’ he remembered. ‘Which is more than some of my colleagues did.’ He scratched his head. ‘He said to me – and I remember his exact words –
If you could have done something, anything, to save her, would you?
I answered that I would, of course I would. He just shrugged and walked out.’

‘And what was that supposed to mean?’ asked Costello, jotting it down in her own shorthand.

‘I suggest you ask him when you meet him, hen.’

Back at the station, Costello reached for the
Clyde Coast Yellow Pages
and turned to ‘Dog Breeders’. She embarked
on a long series of calls, each one starting the same way: ‘I’d just like to ask – do you by any chance breed huskies?’

McAlpine woke from his nightmare, sweating, his face damp with tears. He had been crying in his sleep. In sleep he’d been back among the lightning, the rain, the shattered glass and… then that image, of somebody –
her –
pulling him free…

Since his conversation in the pub with Anderson he had known that Anna’s ghost was waking and stretching, reaching out to him. Every time he went into that murder room, he felt he was being sucked into a tunnel and that at the end of it was Anna, waiting.

He opened his eyes, looking at the ceiling, then closed them again, seeing two little boys running through a field, the younger one stumbling as he tried to keep up, the bigger boy stopping, holding out his hand, helping.

McAlpine opened his eyes. The pain of the loss of his brother suddenly stabbed as sharply as it had twenty-two years ago. He stroked the swelling over his jaw, more to comfort himself than to ease any pain. He turned to try and sleep, letting his mind drift, back to Anna… Anna, who could give him comfort…

But sleep wouldn’t come. He got up from the sofa and went upstairs to the en suite, where it was warm. He washed his face in hot soapy water and took a good slug at the Glenfiddich he kept hidden under some old towels at the bottom of the linen cupboard. That dream had really disturbed him. Standing there, looking in the mirror, eyes focused on his bruises, he could not get the image of the monkey creature squatting on the bonnet of the car out of his mind. It wasn’t the crash or the flames or the glass, the
little taste of death, that was getting to him. The cloak… he could remember as far as the black cloak… but, no matter how hard he pushed, his memory went no further. He could not see the face beyond Anna’s, the curve of her cheek as the lightning fell on it, the lightness of her eyes.

He picked up a towel and held it to his face; it was soft and warm. He closed his eyes, and he could see her, always her, with her blonde halo, on the beach, a shy smile playing on those beautiful lips, her hair more curled than it had been. It suited her.

‘There’s clean stuff in the wardrobe.’ Helena walked in, rubbing sleep from her eyes. ‘Sorry, I did mean to wake you.’

He tried to shake the confusion from his head. ‘I’ve been asleep for two hours. And on a Tuesday afternoon too. Oh, God, my head hurts.’

‘You haven’t seen the papers today?’

‘No, somebody else been murdered while I was asleep?’

Helena smiled wryly. ‘Only my reputation.’

‘A lost cause, then?’

‘I hope it doesn’t cause you any hassle. Terry put his foot in it more than once in an article yesterday. I would sue except his sister is my best friend and an advocate,’ she giggled. ‘Some people.’

‘Goes with the territory. I’ll survive.’

Her voice was suddenly full of comfort. ‘You know that stuff you left behind? I put it all on the piano. Those photographs and your brother’s award?’

‘Yes.’ The response was sharp.

‘You left them in your pocket, and they nearly got put in the wash. If they’re that important to you, you should be more careful.’ He looked at her, his eyes hard, so she tried a different tack. ‘If you want, I’ll get the commendation framed, then you can hang it in the hall.’

McAlpine shook his head.

‘Anyway, I’m going to have a shower now. Then I’ll get back to the gallery, see what they’ve managed to get done without me. You going back to work?’ She stood up, opened the linen cupboard and pulled out three fresh fluffy white towels. ‘Look at you, Alan. You’re a mess,’ she added quietly.

‘I’m snowed under with this case, you know that.’

‘Yes, I do know. Try to get something to eat before you go back to work. There’s some soup in the fridge.’

He lifted his hand, caressing her cheek with the back of his fingers. Seeing blonde hair rather than auburn, a younger, more beautiful face.

‘You will come to the exhibition, won’t you?’ Helena went on. ‘You can walk around insulting everybody’s work and saying, very loudly, that a five-year-old could do better.’ The phone echoed its way up the stairs. ‘I bet you that’s the station.’

He leaned forward to kiss her. The phone was insistent.

He left.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’

Costello shook her head infinitesimally at Anderson before gently closing the door. Neither had ever seen McAlpine so angry.

On his desk was a copy of that day’s
Evening Gazette,
folded open, showing the gossip snippet that somehow merited two column-filling photographs; one showed McAlpine, face battered and bruised, looking very drunk, which was ironic, because he had been sober when it was taken. The other showed Helena in profile, her hair up, wearing what looked like diamond earrings, with a man, also in profile, hovering by her left shoulder. Costello had already read the original piece in the quality broadsheet, Terry
Gilfillan’s preview of Glasgow’s art scene for October, the main topic being Helena’s exhibition. It was the picture they had used that had caught Costello’s attention. Helena laughing, her head inclined towards Gilfillan… suggesting an intimacy that wasn’t there. And from that seed this snide little item had grown. She knew there was no truth in it. But she did wonder what Gilfillan was thinking, to allow them to use
that
photograph. Under the headline ‘Hanging Out’ half a dozen lines invited readers to judge for themselves whether the long hours DCI McAlpine was putting in on the Crucifixion Killer case had driven him to hit the bottle, and his gorgeous wife – ‘owner of the swanky Gallery Cynae’ – into the arms of her ‘good friend and business associate, Glasgow art dealer Terence Gilfillan’.