Out of Bounds (11 page)

‘In my experience, sir, there are two kinds of unsolved murders. There’s the ones where the whole team have no doubt who the killer is – but they can’t prove it. Lack of evidence, maybe, or somebody screws up something crucial so it never gets as far as a charge. Then there’s the ones where you follow all the leads, you chase down everything that
looks like a clue, you interview everybody with the remotest connection to the case, and still you can’t come up with a viable suspect.’

‘I’ve no expertise in cold cases, Chief Inspector, but as far as live cases are concerned, I can’t argue with that.’

Karen inclined her head in acknowledgement and carried on. ‘The thing is, you can’t always tell from the paperwork which category any given case falls into. Because we’ve all learned to be very careful about what we commit to the files. With the level of disclosure the defence demands, nobody puts anything on paper or into the system about a suspect that might end up undermining the case when it comes to court. So which kind was Tina McDonald?’

Diuguid gave her a shrewd look from under his brows. ‘We never had a single suspect worth a damn,’ he said. ‘We tracked down guys she’d danced with that night, guys she’d stood next to at the bar. We spoke to ex-boyfriends. Everybody checked out. The ones that didn’t have an alibi fell down on the DNA.’

‘And that was it? No nod and a wink? Nobody with a grudge? Nobody she’d made a fool of? No history with some guy with a temper?’

Diuguid shook his head, glum. ‘Believe me, I’d be the first to tell you if there was anybody we looked at that was still in the picture when we scaled down the inquiry. It was a genuine mystery. And as far as I know, he never did it again.’

‘Or if he did, he was more careful with his DNA.’

Diuguid nodded. ‘Right enough. But folk watch crime shows on the telly and they think guys that commit sex murders like this can’t stop at one. They’re convinced they’ll strike again and again till they’re caught or they get terminal cancer or they top themselves. But we know that’s not always the way it goes. We know there’s guys that lose control and do one terrible thing completely out of character. And they’re
horrified at themselves. They’re appalled by what they’ve done. But they manage to get past it and they never do anything like it again. How many cold cases have you worked where the perpetrator has kept his nose clean for ten, twenty years or more?’

Karen sighed. He was right. ‘A few,’ she said. ‘Sometimes they’re almost relieved when we turn up with a warrant.’

‘Other times they’re really pissed off,’ Jason mumbled through a mouthful of scone.

Diuguid raised his eyebrows. ‘I can imagine. But the point is, if this is the first time his DNA has produced any kind of hit, you’re obviously looking for someone who has kept his nose clean for the past twenty years. Either that or a dead man.’

‘Or both,’ Karen pointed out. ‘And you’re certain there was nobody your team looked at and had their doubts about?’

Diuguid shook his head. ‘I’d have known. There were no secrets on my squad.’

Karen doubted that very much. In her experience, every cop shop was like a safety deposit vault for secrets. And every now and again, robbers broke in and scattered the secrets round the locker room floor. Andrew Diuguid was, she thought, a man who needed to believe his own propaganda. She didn’t think he knew anything, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to know. ‘Would you mind if we approached some of your junior officers to see whether there was anything they came across that they didn’t think was worth pursuing at the time?’

For a moment she thought he was going to take offence. His shoulders tensed and his hands gripped his knees. Then he relaxed. ‘Be my guest. I doubt any of them are still in the job, mind you. I’ve been to more retirement do’s in the past five years than I can count. That and funerals. I’ve said cheerio to half a dozen men this past few years that were
younger than me. Kevin Sinclair, he was exhibits officer on Tina McDonald, he had bowel cancer. Jim Brown, he ran the actions desk on nearly all my murders, he died out hill walking in the Cairngorms. Heart attack. Tam Smart, the statement collator, his liver packed up. Kenny MacGregor, the dog handler. All of them, gone to the great bar in the sky.’ His eyes hardened, he heaved a sigh and rubbed his hands over the side of his head. Karen imagined it must feel like teddy bear plush.

‘The job takes its toll, right enough. We lost a colleague not so long ago,’ Jason said. Karen gave him a look of disbelief. ‘It’s hard. It’s like you lose wee bits of yourself. The conversations you had that nobody else shared. The gags you laughed at together. Now it’s like they’re wee splinters of your history lost in space.’

‘Exactly,’ Diuguid said, favouring him with a smile, the wintry edge to his stare gone again. ‘But anybody else that’s still kicking about – ask HR, they’ll have contact details, if it’s only where to pay the pension.’

There was nothing more to be had here, she could tell. Karen made polite noises of thanks and disengaged from the interview. She got to her feet, taking Jason by surprise. He’d only just started on his third scone. He scrambled to the door behind her, scattering crumbs and mumbled farewells as he trailed in her wake. Karen stomped ahead of him, head down, saying nothing till they were in the car. Then she rounded on him.

‘What was that about?’ she snapped.

Jason’s expression was a mixture of wariness and uncertainty. ‘What?’ he grunted through the home baking.

‘All that about Phil? What did you think you were doing, talking about him like that?’

Jason swallowed. ‘What he said, all those dead guys. It made me think about Phil. I knew he’d get it.’

In
the grip of strong emotion, Karen struggled to express what she needed to say. ‘We don’t talk about Phil to outsiders. It’s nothing to do with them.’ She wanted to howl at him that Phil was hers and nobody else’s, but she knew that would make her sound deranged so she held back. ‘We don’t talk about him to strangers,’ she said instead, forcing her voice level.

Jason’s face was wounded. ‘We don’t talk about him to each other,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘You won’t talk about him to me and I don’t have anybody else to talk to about him. It was just the three of us on the old team and you won’t share. It’s really hard, boss.’ His lower lip trembled.

She didn’t want to hear this. He was right, she wouldn’t share. She shouldn’t have to. Phil had been hers, the only one who had ever been hers. Talking to Jimmy Hutton was one thing. He had a degree of emotional intelligence the Mint didn’t even know he should aspire to.

She wanted to punch Jason for his presumption, his daring to think he was entitled to a part of her grief. She wanted to punch him hard and keep on punching him till he promised never to speak of Phil again.

Instead, she said nothing. She got out of the car, slammed the door and marched off towards the town centre, angry tears stinging her eyes.

Sod Jason, sod Diuguid and sod the lot of them.

15

K
aren
made it about half a mile along the road before she had her emotions back on the leash. She cast a quick look over her shoulder and spotted Jason in the car about a hundred yards back, creeping along like a punter in search of a working girl. The pair of them must look absurd, she thought. Like something out of a Coen brothers film.

She stopped and turned to face him, beckoning with a small jerk of her head. The car rolled forward and stopped beside her. Karen climbed in, fastened her seat belt and said, ‘You’ve got a perfect right to talk about Phil with me. We were a team once. I’ll try to be better about it.’ It was the nearest she could manage to an apology. It wasn’t Jason’s fault that he was so limited. She made up her mind to think of it as talking to a favourite pet, the way she knew some people did all the time. Share her feelings without any expectation of a helpful response. But some other time. Not right now.

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. He had a smear of jam across his cheek.

‘Aye. Wipe your face, you look like a five-year-old.’

Jason’s eyes widened and he scrubbed at his mouth like
the small child she’d likened him to. ‘Where to now then, boss?’

‘Glasgow. First we’re going to pay a courtesy call to Tina McDonald’s parents. Then we’re going to see Liz Dunleavy. She’s still running Hair Apparent in the West End. I googled her. She’s got three other salons now, but she’s still based in the Byres Road one. Let’s see if we can catch her on the back foot.’

‘Should we not phone her first?’

‘No.’ It was accepted practice in cold case reviews to give witnesses advance notice of interview requests so they could prepare themselves. But Karen had never felt constrained by received wisdom. Liz Dunleavy was one of a group of women who formed the core witnesses in the original inquiry and she didn’t want the hairdresser conferring with her pals to come up with an agreed version of events. With the passage of time, people’s memories always edited the past. A lot of details slipped from their grasp, while others that had seemed trivial at the time took on greater weight. Karen believed it was the brain’s subconscious way of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Time also changed what people were willing to say about the dead. She wanted to cut straight to the chase of what surfaced spontaneously from Tina McDonald’s best friend and boss rather than what collective memory decreed was the case.

‘How not?’ Jason asked, turning on to the main Glasgow road.

‘No conferring, like your starter for ten on
University Challenge
. I don’t want them putting their heads together to decide what we should and shouldn’t be told.’

Jason chuckled. ‘I have to watch that
University Challenge
these days. My flatmates take bets on who can get the most answers right. Me, I never know any of them.’

Karen wasn’t surprised. Somehow Jason had found himself
a flat-share with a trio of Edinburgh University students. She hoped they didn’t patronise him too much. The Mint might be stupid, but he had a good heart. ‘Aye, but I bet they’d be rubbish at securing a crime scene.’

‘No kidding. See, if you saw inside their bedrooms, you’d think we’d had a visit from extreme burglars. Totally shan. My mum would give me a skelp if I left my room like that.’

Karen had met Mrs Murray. She believed him. She tipped her head back, leaning on the headrest, eyes closed. He knew better than to interrupt her when she was thinking. Bricks without straw, that’s what she was doing right now. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t figure out an angle of approach.

The McDonalds had moved since Tina’s murder. At the time, they’d been living in a tenement in Govan within spitting distance of the shipyards where her father had worked in the drawing office. Now they were in Mount Florida, a stone’s throw from the national football stadium. Karen imagined that on match days the roar from Hampden Park would drown out conversation and TV programmes equally.

Eric and Patsy McDonald occupied a first-floor flat in a red sandstone tenement. The close was spotless and smelled of synthetic pine. Karen felt they were out of order just for dragging the dirt from the street into the pristine stairway. She’d phoned ahead to arrange this meeting. There was no benefit to be had from the element of surprise when it came to the families of victims, especially those who had been dead for as long as Tina McDonald.

The door was opened by a silver-haired man in shirt sleeves and the sort of neutral-coloured trousers her father would have called slacks. His face was scored with deep lines and his eyes had the heavy look of someone who hasn’t slept well for a very long time. He had a neatly trimmed moustache that reminded her of the captain in
Dad’s Army
. She hadn’t seen
one quite like it since her parents had dragged her along to the bowling club opening day. She knew from the files he was sixty-three, but he looked a dozen years older. Behind him she could see a small blonde woman hopping from foot to foot, trying to get a better view of the visitors.

‘You’ll be the polis, then?’ Eric McDonald’s voice was resigned, expecting nothing.

Karen introduced herself and Jason. ‘Could we come in?’

‘Let them in, Eric, they’ll be thinking we’ve no manners. Come away in, hen. You too, son.’ Patsy McDonald had the artificial brightness and dead eyes that go hand in hand with prescription antidepressants.

They all trooped into a living room that was stuffed with furniture and ornaments. Apparently Patsy McDonald collected Toby jugs and every surface that wasn’t occupied by framed photographs of Tina held a selection of some of the ugliest pottery Karen had ever seen. She sat down next to Jason on the sofa and the McDonalds angled their armchairs towards her.

‘I suppose this is another one of your routine visits. Where you tell us the case is never closed,’ Eric said drily, reaching for the cigarette packet on the side table next to him.

‘Actually, no,’ Karen said. ‘We’re here because we’ve had a breakthrough.’ Eric paused with the lighter flame inches from his cigarette, eyes wide.

Patsy literally jumped in her seat, ending up perched on the edge. ‘Really?’ she exclaimed. ‘Have you got him? Have you got the bastard who took our Tina?’ Then she flushed. ‘Excuse my French.’

‘No need to apologise. We’ve not got him yet, but we’re very close.’

‘You know who he is, though?’ Excited, Patsy was bouncing up and down.

‘Not exactly. If I could explain?’ The McDonalds looked
at each other, nodding in unison. ‘There was a car accident at the weekend in Dundee and the driver is in a coma. But a blood sample was taken at the hospital and when it was run against the national database—’

‘You got a match?’ Patsy was on her feet, her hands clawing at her neck. ‘Oh my God, Eric, they got a match.’

‘Please, Mrs McDonald. If you’d let me finish?’

‘Sit down, Patsy. Let the woman speak,’ Eric said, puffing as he lit up.

Patsy subsided and looked at Karen with damp eyes. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘It wasn’t an exact match. But it was enough of a fit for the lab team to tell us that whoever attacked Tina was a close male relative of the young man in the coma. He wasn’t even born when Tina died, by the way.’