When The Devil Drives (31 page)

‘And is there?’

‘Yes. The bad news for us is that I’ve double-checked my count and it currently shows thirty-three names.’

‘Shit,’ said Catherine, then she picked up on Beano’s key word. ‘Hang on, what do you mean “currently”?’

This prompted a grin from the Detective Constable.

‘Because the bad news for the guy who sent it is that, working for the RSB, I’m guessing they teach you a lot more about using Excel and PowerPoint than about using Word. This document was edited about two minutes before it was sent.’

‘That’s as may be,’ Catherine countered, ‘but if he just opened it to check it was the right file, it would say it was last edited at that point, wouldn’t it?’

‘Only if changes were made. I’m guessing he’s never clicked on the Review tab, or he’d know that the Track Changes option had been enabled.’

‘And does that show that something’s been deleted?’

‘Better than that. Not only can I tell you for sure that there was a thirty-fourth person on that list, I can tell you his name and, just as importantly, who deleted it.’

The village of Balnavon was clouded in a light and misty drizzle as Fallan drove Jasmine through it in his Land Rover. The dreich weather was having the opposite effect of the sunshine upon Culfieth Hydro, rendering what ought to have appeared a couthy and charming little rural settlement gloomy and oppressive. Tearooms and tourist shops that might otherwise have appeared cosy and colourful looked washed-out and claustrophobic, venues for interminably miserable afternoons on ill-judged day trips.

She could understand why Callum Ross got out; the only question was how he’d stuck it here so long. The surrounding countryside was no doubt spectacular, when you could see it through the clouds of rain and clouds of midges but, having grown up in the comforting anonymity of cities, Jasmine couldn’t imagine walking down the same wee streets every day, seeing the same faces, knowing every one of them and every one of them knowing your business.

They had passed the Kildrachan estate on the way into town, its broad entrance sweeping away from the road between two redoubtable stone gateposts. There was no visible sign of the house itself, the track quickly vanishing into dense and mature woodland. Jasmine couldn’t stop herself wondering whether Tessa Garrion’s remains lay somewhere behind those gates and beneath the dark of those trees, waiting for discovery and the justice it might bring. Little that she had uncovered about this case had given her reason to believe Tessa had survived the summer of 1981; and only the flaky testimony of a hippy-chick barmaid suggested she had ever made it out of Balnavon. Whether she had got on that bus or not, what was indisputable was that she’d never been seen again.

Jasmine knew from a conversation with Charlotte that Hamish’s elderly parents still lived at Kildrachan with a small housekeeping
staff. She felt dreadful for them. She didn’t imagine losing a child was any easier when he was fifty-five than if he was a tenth of that and, coming towards the last years of your own life, surely you’d want the comfort of knowing that those you had brought into the world were going to keep thriving.

The thought of Charlotte had given her more pause. Charlotte had grown up at Hamish’s own handsome Highland pile, about thirty miles away in Ardcruich. She was most likely with her mother down south, but Jasmine couldn’t help but worry in case she was visiting her grandparents for mutual comfort and support.

Their last words had been in anger, mainly Charlotte’s. It had been ten minutes of stream-of-consciousness invective, circular and repetitive, fired by that unique indignation felt by the over-privileged on the rare occasions when the world didn’t bow to their expectations.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she kept saying. There wasn’t any particular detail she was incredulous of, so much as the revelation that a nobody such as Jasmine could do anything other than kiss her Pilates-sculpted arse. Gotta watch this breed, Charlotte, they’ll turn on ya.

‘I can’t believe you would betray me like this,’ was her opening salvo. As in, before even identifying herself to the person who had answered the phone. ‘You’re working for that bitch, aren’t you? I put myself out for you and you’re just a muck-raker, sifting through the dirt for that gold-digger. I can’t believe it. I thought you were a friend. I thought you were somebody I could trust. You made your job sound all clever and exciting but it’s just sleaze and innuendo. I can’t believe it.’

It didn’t sound like Hamish had told Charlotte much, or indeed anything, about what they had actually discussed. As far as Jasmine knew, he may not have lied outright to his daughter either: it seemed to be Charlotte who was drawing her own conclusions, revealing a few of the chinks in her armour as a result. Hamish Queen was divorced from Charlotte’s mother, who had been his second wife, and it turned out he had been in the throes of divorce number three. Charlotte, needless to say, wasn’t galpals with her mother’s successor, and was clearly still bearing a lot of scars from the break-up.

If Jasmine ran into her up here, it wouldn’t so much be awkward as utterly sordid.

Jasmine had placed a call to Mrs Petrie to give her an update. It was just a means of checking in and making sure she was still content for Jasmine to pursue her inquiries; she had no intention of telling her what those inquiries were unavoidably pointing to.

She didn’t get to speak to her. Mrs Petrie’s daughter answered the call and informed her that her mother was in hospital ‘again’. Alison, as she gave her name, had come down to Cornwall to help out.

‘She has peaks and troughs,’ Alison said. ‘We’re hoping she’ll be back on her feet in a few days, but you always worry how much each bad spell is going to take out of her.’

‘I understand,’ Jasmine had told her.

She gave Alison a vague and neutral message to pass on regarding her progress. Making inquiries, developing a picture of Tessa’s life as an actress, following up solid leads. She worded it carefully: ‘solid’ rather than ‘good’. Solid made it sound like reliable information; good made it sound like it would lead to a positive resolution.

On one level it was a relief not to talk to Mrs Petrie direct, not to have to hear the guarded hope in her voice as she asked questions, and not to feel like a sleaze for stringing her along and keeping back the truth. On another level, her call to Alison brought home how painful this was all ultimately going to be, when she would have to tell Alice, like all those other clients before her, that she had acted too late in trying to find her sister. Thirty years too late, in fact.

She recalled her mum’s deterioration, the way she’d look like she was slipping into the final throes, but somehow kept finding it in herself to rally. What would it do to Mrs Petrie when the one thing she had pinned her hopes upon was taken away?

The church hall, or rather the ‘community centre’ was right on the main drag, the church itself set back from the road up a short but steep banking. Even allowing for the greyness of the day it was the epitome of nondescript: Calvinist austerity extending even to the architecture. If buildings could have emotions, this one looked like it was in the huff, tucked away from the passing traffic and sulkily determined not to catch anyone’s eye.

Across the street and just a few yards further north was the Balnavon Hotel, a more welcoming sight partly due to its brighter aesthetics, but as much down to the chalkwritten promise of a pub lunch after the best part of three hours on the road.

Fallan went up to the bar to order while Jasmine sat at a wooden table and took in the surroundings. The walls were bare stone, hand-hewn rocks rather than kiln-fired brick, the floor a matt sheen of dark grey slate. It might have seemed a little cold but for the fire in the grate, which instead added to an atmosphere that was both warm and somehow timeless. It was easy to imagine the place having changed little in maybe a hundred years.

She would have been completely wrong, though. Framed photographs betrayed how the interior had looked not so long ago: plaster and paint on the walls, swirly carpets on the floor, beaten-copper tabletops and garish tartan upholstery. She saw images of smiling groups posing for the camera to record big nights: grinning, tipsy men holding up a huge fish; a man with a golf ball in one hand and in the other a cardboard number one with a hole through it; footballers displaying signed jerseys or just posing with the regulars.

Fallan returned with the drinks and some encouraging information.

‘Checked the licensee certificate on the wall,’ he told her. ‘It says Mr M. Aitken.’

Callum Ross had told them that back in 1981 the hotel was run by a Charlie Aitken. With any luck, like the establishment across the road, they had kept it in the family.

A waitress brought their food; she was a young girl in her late teens or early twenties. She spoke with a soft and lilting Highland accent, warning them to watch their plates as they were very hot.

Jasmine asked if the owner was in, and if so could she speak to him.

The girl said she’d just go and get him, but didn’t leave without first making sure they had all the condiments and drinks they needed.

Jasmine watched her withdraw into the corridor leading to reception, and heard her call out as she walked.

‘Dad, you busy?’

A brawny and bearded man emerged into the bar a few minutes later, approaching their table with a helpful smile. He looked late forties or early fifties, and Jasmine immediately pictured him halfway up a mountain when he wasn’t behind his bar or his reception desk.

‘I’m Murdo Aitken,’ he introduced himself. ‘Is everything all right with your meal?’

‘It’s fantastic,’ Jasmine replied truthfully of a very welcome plate of beer-battered haddock and chips. ‘The decor is lovely too. Did you renovate it recently? It’s very striking. A real improvement.’

‘You look a bit young to remember it before, but thank you.’

‘I saw the photos,’ she said.

‘Aye, right enough. No, it was done about, God, is it really ten years? Aye, ten years ago now. I took over from my old man in ninety-six, and I meant to change it sooner, but you know how it is.’

Jasmine agreed, thinking of that office furniture she was going to buy before she retired.

‘We kept the photos, wee bit of continuity, keep the old spirit of the place. Was there something I can help you with?’

‘Perhaps. Did you work here a long time before you took over?’

‘All my days. Started off washing dishes and I was behind the bar as soon as I was legal. Why?’

‘We’re trying to find out a bit about a woman who worked here in 1981. She was from New Zealand, went by the name Saffron.’

Aitken screwed up his face in thought for only the briefest moment. His eyes lit up in recognition before an equally swift change in his expression brought on a hint of rather furtive concern.

‘Aye, I remember Saffron all right. She wasn’t here long, just a couple of months. Looked like she’d just come in from Woodstock, or maybe
Lord of the Rings
. Seemed very exotic to me, though I was about eighteen and never been further than Perth.’

‘You don’t happen to remember her surname, by any chance?’ Jasmine asked, her tone almost apologising in anticipation of being rebuffed. It was, after all, a long shot at thirty years.

‘Simpson,’ he replied almost instantly, a little smile creeping across his face. ‘And her real name was Veronica.’

‘That’s some memory,’ Fallan observed. ‘Can you rhyme off everybody who worked here?’

‘No,’ Aitken replied, looking a little coy. ‘But her name was easy to remember, because she told me some people used to call her Roni.’

Jasmine’s blank expression must have begged an explanation.

‘Ronnie Simpson,’ Fallan offered. ‘Celtic goalkeeper. One of the Lisbon Lions.’

‘That’s right,’ Aitken confirmed, a little bashfully.

‘Do you remember when she left and where she went?’

‘I remember she left pretty suddenly. She didn’t turn up for work, just phoned to say she was packing it in and moving on. Gave absolutely no notice. Her landlord said much the same thing: she called him and told him she was shipping out. Lived in one of the wee places just along the street, on the road north. We wondered if she’d got bad news or something. We were all pretty disappointed. She had the sort of personality that lit a place up, really outgoing, priceless in a pub.’

Aitken had that furtive look again, like he’d given something away. Fallan read it better than Jasmine.

‘I’m guessing it wasn’t just her name that made her easy to remember,’ he said, once Aitken had retreated back to Reception.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he was eighteen and she was a woman of the world. I’m guessing he was just a boy when Saffron started working here, but a man shortly after.’

They located the Reverend Tormod McDonald a little while later, via Fallan’s suggested strategy of wandering across the road to his churchyard and making themselves sufficiently conspicuous that someone would inevitably come out and inquire as to what they were doing there. Discreet inquiries had suggested they were more likely to find him in Balnavon than Baghdad, but Jasmine was surprised that it was the man himself who appeared in the grounds and very politely asked them if he could be of any help. After recent weeks, it was quite a relief to encounter a veteran of the Glass Shoe debacle who wasn’t protected by the human firewall of a PA or secretary; and nor was he likely to have been on Hamish’s round-robin advance warning list.

He was thin and angular, a gawkiness about his posture like a small man trapped in too tall a body, or as though he had never quite outgrown the physical awkwardness of his teenage years. The effect seemed all the more pronounced alongside Fallan, who carried his stature so effortlessly that it was easy to forget just how big he was. Jasmine was reminded of Aunt Spiker in
James and the Giant Peach
, though Tormod lacked the harshness in his face that she had always imagined on Roald Dahl’s monstrous creation. Nor did his features suggest the pinched and curmudgeonly figure Callum Ross had described as having sired him.