Authors: Val McDermid
‘She didn’t “die”,’ Eric said angrily. ‘She was murdered.’
Sometimes you couldn’t win, Karen thought. When you called a spade a spade, some relatives flinched and wept to be reminded of the horror. When you attempted delicacy, others, like Eric McDonald, took offence at what they saw as a failure to acknowledge the enormity of what had been done to their loved ones. ‘And we never forget that, Mr McDonald. And we are closer to the man who killed her than we have ever been.’
‘So have you arrested him? This “close male relative”?’ Eric demanded.
‘Not yet. There’s a complication. The young man in question was adopted, so we need to trace his birth parents.’
‘Does he not know who they are? Has he no curiosity?’ Eric’s voice was heavy with contempt.
‘He doesn’t actually know he was adopted,’ Jason said. ‘If he comes round, it’s going to come as a bit of a shock to him.’
‘I don’t care about him. All I care about is finding who killed our lassie,’ Patsy said. ‘You’re going to get him, right? Like Mr Diuguid said when it happened.’
‘Diuguid.’ Eric snorted. ‘Do nothing, more like. So what’s stopping you?’
‘The law, Mr McDonald. We have to go to court to ask the sheriff to allow us access to this young man’s birth records.’
‘What’s holding you back?’
‘We’re moving as quickly as we can, I promise you. We’ll be taking this to court as soon as we can get it on the list. Then our lawyer will try to persuade the sheriff to let us see the original birth certificate.’
‘But he will let you, right?’ Patsy again. ‘I mean, he’ll understand we need to know what happened to Tina.’
‘Of course he will,’ Eric said. ‘It stands to reason. There can’t be anything more important than putting a murderer away.’
‘It may not be entirely straightforward,’ Karen said mildly. ‘There are human rights issues at stake.’
Eric’s face darkened. He looked like a man on the edge of a stroke. ‘Human rights? Human bloody rights? What about our human rights? We’ve got a right to know what happened to our daughter. Twenty years we’ve lived with what that man did to her. Twenty bloody years. He wasn’t thinking about Tina’s human rights when he—’ He abruptly ran out of steam.
‘What my man’s saying is you need to go away and do whatever it is you need to do to put this bastard away.’ No apology this time. Patsy’s dander was well and truly up.
‘And that’s exactly what we are doing.’ Karen got to her feet. ‘Before we go – is there anything new that’s come up about what happened to Tina? Any wee details you might have overlooked? Anything somebody’s said?’
‘We’d have been straight on the phone if there was,’ Patsy said. ‘You think you want answers? You should walk a mile in our shoes.’
L
iz
Dunleavy always felt a sense of homecoming when she walked through the door of the original Hair Apparent. It hadn’t always been like that. At first, she’d felt like a bit of a chancer. The inhabitants of the red sandstone tenement streets of the West End of Glasgow who weren’t still students were mostly academics or media professionals. Liz often said to her clients that you could open a bookshop stocked only with the publications of the people who lived in the G12 postcode. By contrast, Liz had grown up in the East End of the city, in a tenement that had dodged slum clearance by the skin of its rotten teeth. Neither parent had any expectations of their six children except that they would likely be more trouble than they were worth. What Liz had lacked in advantages, she’d more than made up for in ambition, and her own transformation had been her greatest work of the stylist’s art.
When she’d opened up her first salon, the location had been at the unfashionable end of Byres Road, but the world had changed to her advantage. Now Hair Apparent was surrounded by the kind of cafés where you could get any beverage except a straightforward cup of coffee; an artisan
bakery; a handful of reasonable places to eat; estate agents staffed by tense and rapacious young people; and pubs that had been stripped to the bone and reconstructed in the image that attracted students and young professionals trying to stay in contact with their misspent youth.
Liz had spent the morning in the most recent of her acquisitions, a mile away on the main drag in the part of Maryhill that estate agents optimistically and mendaciously referred to as North Kelvinside. The salon hadn’t quite found its feet yet. Even though it had been gutted and reinvented as a flagship for leading-edge style, baffled pensioners kept on making appointments, complaining about the music, demanding endless cups of coffee then whingeing about the prices. She needed to reach out to the young professionals who were colonising the area. She was going to have to spend some money. Leaflets with a voucher, that was the way to go. It was over the budget, but something had to be done.
When she got back, she’d had to drive round the block three times before she found a parking space. Tomorrow, she promised herself as she walked into the salon. Tomorrow she’d bite the bullet and sort out some flyers. A fiver off a cut, another fiver off a colour.
The familiar smell of the salon was enough to relax her shoulders. Coconut and lime, the signature fragrance of the products they used, and the faint underlying tang of chemicals; those were the odours that spelled comfort to Liz. That and the music, a perpetual Spotify loop of her personal favourites from the past thirty years. The three stylists working their chairs looked up as she walked in. They nodded, smiled, muttered greetings then went back to their clients. Liz swept through, stopping for a moment to touch base with Callum’s customer, a middle-aged woman who was something senior in the university admin and had been coming to the salon for more than a dozen years. ‘You’re looking great,
Margaret, have you lost weight?’ Liz asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror. One thing was certain. She was wearing better than Margaret Somerville.
At the desk she double-checked the appointments screen. Twenty minutes till her next appointment. ‘I’m going through the back for a cup of coffee, Jeannie,’ she said to the junior running the diary. As she spoke, the door opened and what she characterised as a very odd couple walked in. A woman in her thirties in quite a good suit – from Whistles, Liz thought – that didn’t fit properly, a good head of thick brown hair in need of an emergency cut, and a ginger in his twenties who looked mortified in his cheap suit, scuffed shoes and cookie-cutter style cut to template rather than the shape of his head. Not her usual clientele. They made straight for the desk.
Jeannie turned on her sweet smile. ‘Hello. Can I help you? Have you got an appointment?’
‘I’m looking for Liz Dunleavy,’ the woman said.
Cautious, Liz said, ‘You’ve found her. Do you have an appointment?’
The woman shook her head, a twitch of amusement lifting one corner of her mouth. ‘No, I don’t. All I need is a wee bit of your time.’
Liz raised one eyebrow, casting a practised eye over the woman’s hair. ‘It’ll take more than a wee bit of my time to give your hair the treatment it deserves,’ she said drily.
‘I’m not here for a cut and blow.’ She produced a card from her pocket. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie from the Historic Cases Unit. And this is Detective Constable Jason Murray.’
Liz felt her face stiffen. Her mouth dried. ‘Tina,’ she croaked. Not dead and buried, then. She’d wondered if it would come to this one day. Every time the words ‘cold case’ caught her ear on the news, she’d freeze, half-expecting Tina’s name.
‘That’s right,’ Karen said. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’
Liz raised one finger. This wasn’t an encounter she wanted to rush. ‘One minute.’ She turned to the screen, ran her finger down the next time slot. ‘Callum?’
He stopped snipping and gave her an enquiring look. ‘Wassup?’
‘Do you mind doing my two o’clock?’ She extended a perfectly manicured hand towards Karen. ‘This is going to take more than quarter of an hour.’
Callum rolled his eyes. ‘I was going over to Kember and Jones for some of that lovely fig and fennel bread.’
‘Jeannie’ll go for you when she’s got a minute.’ What had happened to Scottish men, Liz wondered in passing.
Callum sighed. ‘Oh, all right. But you owe me.’
Liz’s smile was an object lesson in insincerity. ‘Jeannie, take the money for Callum’s bread out of the petty cash. I’ll be in the back and I don’t want any interruptions.’ Finally, she gave Karen her full attention. ‘Come with me, Inspector. We’ll get some peace and quiet and a cup of coffee.’ Though a large vodka and coke would have been more welcome.
She led the way into the back shop, a small, awkwardly shaped room with a scatter of unmatching upright chairs, every other surface scattered with the detritus of the trade. Boxes of product were stacked in the corners and a shiny coffee machine hogged a narrow counter next to the door. For the first time, Liz saw it through a stranger’s eyes and felt mildly embarrassed about the chaos. ‘Have a seat. Sorry about the mess. All the energy goes into the front shop.’
Karen smiled again. ‘You could say the same about a lot of the people we arrest.’
‘Coffee? Tea?’ Liz moved towards the machine. She wanted to keep control of the conversation – no, it wasn’t a conversation, it was an interview, no matter how friendly this woman was trying to appear.
‘We’re fine,’ Karen said. ‘But don’t let us stop you. Shall we sit down?’
She’d lost already, Liz realised, perching on the edge of a wooden chair with a seat covered in padded vinyl. She crossed her legs and cupped her left elbow in her right hand. Then she folded her hands in her lap, remembering all she’d read about body language. ‘Have you got new evidence to open up the case, then?’
‘Unsolved cases are never closed, Liz. You don’t mind me calling you Liz?’
‘No, it’s my name.’ She managed a weak smile.
‘So the case was never closed. Periodically we review all unsolved murders.’
‘It’s just routine, then?’ Liz was crestfallen. Nothing would bring Tina back, but she would have truly enjoyed seeing someone lose their freedom for what they’d done to her.
‘None of our cases are routine to us. We’re as keen to get a result as the original team of detectives. It gives me heartburn to think of murderers walking around scot-free.’
Liz was taken aback by the depth of feeling in Karen’s voice. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest …’
‘It’s all right. We’re at the early stages of our inquiry, though. I’d like you to go through what you remember from that night.’
‘I gave statements at the time. Do you not have copies of them?’
‘We do. And chances are, Jason here will be going through those statements line by line with you. But first, I want to hear what comes to your mind when you think back to that night.’
Liz forgot all about body language and hugged herself. ‘I’ve gone over this in my head a million times. We should have stuck together. We should have been keeping tabs on each other. But by the time we got to the club, Bluebeard’s,
we’d had a few bevvies and we were up for a good laugh. We started out all dancing together, but you know how it is?’ She looked away.
‘So, you all started dancing with other people? With guys?’
‘Aye. Marie peeled off first. She was always quick off the mark, you know what I mean? Then Jan ran into a guy she knew from where she used to work, and she went off to the bar for a drink with him. Then it was just me and Tina, and these two guys started dancing with us. Only a couple of numbers, then I went to the loo. When I came back, I couldn’t see Tina.’ She shivered, took a deep breath and collected herself.
‘It wasn’t like she’d disappeared or anything. I spotted her a few times over the next couple of hours, but, I’ll be honest, I was quite interested in this guy that was chatting me up, so I wasn’t looking out for her.’ Liz hung her head, a familiar guilt churning her stomach. ‘I should have been.’
Karen shifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘You weren’t her keeper. We’ve all gone out with our pals and stopped paying attention because someone we fancy has taken an interest in us. That’s the way of the world, not something to beat yourself up about.’ She smiled, reassuring. ‘When you did catch sight of her, was she with one person in particular?’
‘I didn’t really notice. I’m sorry.’
‘Then when it came time to go home, she was nowhere to be seen?’ Karen’s gaze was unrelenting. It reminded Liz of the way her maths teacher used to look at her, challenging her to do better. And she had done better. Better than any of the other lassies in her class.
‘We looked for her, but we couldn’t find her.’ Her hand went to her mouth and she chewed the skin round her thumbnail. ‘We told ourselves she’d clicked and gone home with some guy. It was the easiest thing to think, plus we were all pretty pissed by then. It was only later, the next morning
when I was coming round with a cup of coffee, I thought to myself it wasn’t really Tina’s style, picking a guy up in a club. But I never thought …’
‘Why would you?’ Karen reached across the small space and patted her knee. ‘This was not your fault, Liz. None of it. Nothing you did or didn’t do made this happen.’
Liz wished she still smoked, longing for the luxury of something to cling to and hide behind. ‘I know that with my head, but inside, I blame myself. I blame the other two as well.’ Her face screwed up in pain. ‘We never see each other these days. Marie and Jan, they were both out the door within weeks. New jobs, clean slates. We never said anything, but I think seeing each other every day reminded us of what happened to Tina.’ She squeezed out a distorted smile. ‘She was lovely, Tina. Always had a smile for everybody. Always put herself out for folk. The customers loved her.’ She blinked hard.
‘When you met up in the Starburst Bar, did you notice anybody paying particular attention to you?’
Liz shook her head. ‘It was my birthday. Somebody stalking us was the last thing on our minds.’
‘Tina arrived last, right? She walked up from the underground? And you didn’t see anybody coming in behind her?’
Liz was taken aback. ‘The underground?’
‘That’s right. That’s how she got there that night.’