Candles and Roses (20 page)

McKay nodded. ‘If you come up with any ideas, if you think of anyone, please let us know. Even if it’s a name from years ago, it might give us a lead. We need to find out who her friends were, what kind of circles she moved in.’

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ Cameron said.

‘You’ve not kept anything of hers?’ Horton suggested. ‘Old diaries, notebooks, anything that might potentially be useful to us?’

‘I cleared the whole place out when I remarried,’ Cameron said. ‘Burnt the lot.’

‘What about Joanne’s mother?’ McKay said. ‘Do you think she might have kept in touch with Joanne? Is it possible that’s where Joanne went?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine. She made no effort to keep in touch with me, but that’s hardly surprising.’

‘You’ve no recent contact details for your ex-wife?’

‘Nothing.’ Cameron fumbled in his jacket pocket. ‘I’ve got the old address I promised you. Where she was living at the time of the divorce. Address in Edinburgh. She was staying with an old school friend who’d moved down there to work. But that’s all I know.’

‘Thank you,’ McKay said. ‘That may be a useful start for us.’

‘Maybe,’ Cameron said. ‘I know she’s no longer there. And her friend’s long gone too. But good luck.’

‘Anything else you can tell us about your daughter, Mr Cameron? Anything that might give us some sort of lead?’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve not seen her for ten years or more.’

‘Can you think of any reason why anyone might want to kill her?’

‘Could be a thousand reasons. She always struck me as the type who’d make a natural victim. You know what I mean?’

‘Not really,’ McKay said. ‘For us, a victim is just that.’

‘Aye, well. You never met her.’ Cameron seemed to have switched off, as if the interview was already over. ‘Anything else you want from me?’

McKay was tempted to string him along with further questions. But his sense was that they’d get no more out of Cameron for the moment. The man was an undoubted arsehole, and possibly an abusive one, but McKay wasn’t convinced there was anything more to him than that. They needed something more if they were going to take this any further. ‘No, that’s fine for today, Mr Cameron. We’ll probably need to talk to you again as the investigation proceeds. I take it that won’t be a problem?’

‘Talk away,’ Cameron said. ‘Just don’t expect me to have any new answers.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘What do you reckon?’ Horton said, once they’d offloaded Cameron. Josh Carlisle had offered to ferry him back to his place of work. Carlisle was something of a petrol-head, who’d welcome the chance to stroke the shiny new BMWs.

‘I reckon we’re getting nowhere,’ McKay said.

‘You don’t think Cameron’s our man?’

‘Well, he
could
be. He’s our best fit so far.’

‘We could try for a warrant. Check his house. His car.’

‘On what basis? We’ve nothing. Just a clear dislike for his ex-wife and a lack of interest in his estranged daughter. If we went with those, we’d have a thousand candidates.’

‘He’s an abuser.’

‘We
think
he’s an abuser. OK, we know he is, you and I, with our well-honed coppers’ intuition. But we’ve no evidence for it. We haven’t even met his second wife or his step-daughters. I can’t see us getting a warrant without something more. And don’t forget that, as far as the public’s concerned, he’ll be the bereaved father. If we harass him and find nothing, it won’t look good.’

‘So what then?’

‘I don’t think we can do much more than keep a close eye on him. See what we can do to track down this ex-wife. Get something more that means we can bring him in again.’

They both sat in glum silence for a moment. Finally McKay said: ‘We’ve got to find the connection. What is it that links these three women?’

‘They’re local. Looks like they were all abused. All left home at the first chance, two at least to Manchester.’

‘So did they meet? Did they know each other? Did they have some common connection? How did the killer know all of them?’

‘Maybe it’s not that personal,’ Horton said.

‘But the candles and roses suggest something personal. Something more than a set of random killings. Some sort of tribute, commemoration?’

‘OK. So that suggests some connection. But we’re a long way from finding out what it might be. There’s no sign it’s anything to do with what they were doing at the time of their deaths. We’re still working through the list of names that Danny Reynolds gave us for Katy Scott, but not getting much joy. The few we’ve contacted barely remember her. Same with the other two. They barely seem to have made a dent during their time on earth.’

‘Very poetic,’ McKay observed, dourly. ‘Christ, it’s a depressing thought, isn’t it? You’re here and then you’re gone, and no bugger even notices.’

‘Maybe that’s what our killer thought, too,’ Horton said. ‘At least these three were provided with candles and flowers. Someone wanted them remembered.’

***

When she heard on the news that they’d found a third body—in the old retirement home up beyond Rosemarkie of all places—she’d almost been tempted to jack in the job. That was what Greg would have preferred, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say it. It was what her parents would have preferred, too, but she’d made a point of not discussing it with them.

Kelly wasn’t sure how seriously to take any of this. From the little that the police had said, it wasn’t even clear the killings had taken place locally. The victims were all from the area originally, but the first two at least had been living in England. It didn’t necessarily mean the so-called Black Isle killer was really lurking behind the next corner.

In any case, something brought her back to the Caledonian Bar the next day and the day after. She told herself she was simply being responsible. You didn’t walk out on a job without good reason, even if your boss was Denny Gorman. And the money was always useful. Anything she could scrape together before uni was bound to be a help.

But, on top of all that, there was her own curiosity. She couldn’t seriously see Gorman as any kind of killer. He seemed far too ineffectual for that. But there was something in the way he’d talked about Lizzie Hamilton. Something that left her uneasy and intrigued.

So the next lunchtime found her back in the Caley Bar, serving well-spaced pints to the usual crowd of elderly men, fending off the unserious advances of the building boys. They were a sweet bunch, most of them. Scarcely out of school, keen to impress each other. About as suave and sophisticated as their bricks, but good natured and lively. Every day they hit the bar like a whirlwind at around twelve-thirty, and forty-five minutes later they were gone, leaving only a haze of beer fumes and sweat.

Gorman himself continued to be well-behaved, perched in his usual spot at the bar, dressed in one of his limited array of heavy-metal tee-shirts, his sparse greasy hair flopping over his badly-shaven face. He was drinking more than ever, increasingly alternating his chain of pints with shots of whisky. The drinking seemed only to make him more morose but he showed no obvious signs of drunkenness. Occasionally he’d offer some comment about the practical running of the bar, but mostly he sat in silence, flicking through his newspaper. She didn’t even have the sense that he was watching her the way he had before. It was as if he had something else on his mind.

The first hour or so went pretty much as usual. At around one forty-five, Gorman looked up from his newspaper. ‘You in a rush today, Kelly?’

The truth was she was in no hurry at all. Greg was working up with his dad carrying out some running repairs on the holiday chalets and wouldn’t be free till after six. She’d no plans for the afternoon other than reading some Anne Brontë. On the other hand, she’d no idea what lay behind Gorman’s query.

‘Not desperately. Why?’

‘Been doing a stocktake. Just wondered if you could help me finish it off.’ He waved his glass of whisky vaguely in her direction. ‘You can probably count better than I can. I’m likely to see double.’ It was the kind of joke he often made, as if by acknowledging his alcoholism he could somehow negate it.

‘What do you need doing?’

‘I’ve done all the stock in here and the storeroom. Just need to do a check on what’s in the cellar. Shouldn’t take you more than half an hour. I’ll pay you for the whole extra hour, obviously.’

Obviously, she thought. No-one could accuse Gorman of being tight with money, though that was possibly because he had no conception of its value. She still couldn’t see how this business wasn’t going to go down the tubes sooner rather than later.

There was no obvious way of extracting herself from this without seeming rude. ‘I suppose,’ she said. ‘Though I need to be away by three at the latest. I’ve arranged to meet Greg. My boyfriend.’ It wasn’t true, but she thought it best to leave Gorman in no doubt where things stood.

He regarded her for a moment, as if unsure what to make of her last comment. ‘That’s grand. Like I say, half an hour max.’

The task was as easy as he’d suggested. Most of the bar’s stock was kept in the small storeroom by the bar. Apart from the casks and kegs, the stock in the cellar was mostly boxes of the more obscure spirits that only needed replacing occasionally, plus various oddities Gorman had presumably bought for experimental purposes. He’d given her a flashlight and notebook and asked her to jot down whatever she could find down there. She’d been tempted to include sections headed ‘Junk’ and ‘Spiders’.

Twenty minutes later, she was pretty much done. She took one last look around the darker corners of the cellar to check she hadn’t missed anything and turned to leave.

Gorman was standing in the doorway, his bulky frame blocking the light from the stair.

‘Just finished,’ she said, brightly. ‘Here’s the list.’

Gorman remained motionless, saying nothing. She held out the notebook. ‘Wasn’t a lot, but I think I’ve got everything down.’

‘She just left,’ Gorman said, quietly. ‘You need to understand that.’

She hesitated, conscious that Gorman was showing no signs of moving out of her way. ‘You said. It’s none of my business anyway.’

‘She just left,’ Gorman repeated. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Why does anyone do anything?’ Kelly was aware how inane her words sounded. She looked pointedly at her watch. ‘I should be off.’

‘I just want you to know that. I don’t know why she left. It was nothing to do with me.’

‘Like I say—’ She risked another few steps. Gorman had still not moved. She could smell the beer and whisky on the breath.

‘You’re all the same, aren’t you?’ Gorman said.

‘I don’t know what—’

‘All the same. You come here. Dressed like
that
.’ He gestured in her direction as if to illustrate his point. Kelly had been dressing in the same shapeless jumpers and jeans since her second day. ‘Pretending you’re interested. Then you fuck off to your fucking
boyfriends
.’ He spat out the last word like an obscenity.

‘Look, I think I’d better get upstairs.’ She was determined not to be intimidated. Gorman was nothing more than a fat, useless, drunken lump. She walked forward assertively, intending if necessary to push past.

‘You’re all the fucking same,’ he repeated, more morosely now. The moment of anger, whatever might have occasioned it, seemed to have passed. He was on the point of collapsing back into his usual self-pity. She took another step towards him.

Then, unexpectedly, he grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her back, twisting her body so she was pressed against the bare brick wall behind the doorway. ‘I told you,’ he spat. ‘She just left. She just fucking
left
.’ His semi-shaven face was inches from hers, the alcohol stench filling her nose and mouth. She swallowed, feeling the nausea rising in her throat, the hard pressure of his fingers through her jumper. His body was touching hers and she could sense, if not feel, his arousal.

She had stopped thinking rationally, her mind overwhelmed by a cocktail of fear and anger. Almost without realising what she was doing, she raised her right knee and rammed it as hard as she could into his groin. At the same moment, she thrust him hard in the chest, driving him away from her.

His expression, a mix of surprise and agony, was almost cartoon-like. He staggered back and she gave him another push for good measure, sending him sprawling against the row of casks. He was stronger than she was but he was also very drunk. She realised now that he concealed his inebriation simply by not moving or speaking more than necessary. Having lost his equilibrium, he tottered and fell backwards, ending up awkwardly between two metal barrels.

She didn’t wait to see what happened after that, but ran as fast as she could up the stone stairs and out into the bar. A couple of the elderly men were still sitting at one of the tables, half-drunk pints in front of them. Both looked up without curiosity as she passed. Pausing only momentarily to grab her coat and handbag from behind the door, she exited into the street without looking back.

Outside, she was faintly surprised, as she often was after leaving the Caledonian Bar, to realise it was still light. The rain had lessened but there was still a chill drizzle in the air. She’d been dreading the prospect of waiting at the bus stop, knowing that Gorman might emerge at any moment, but a bus was already approaching. She signalled frantically to the driver and threw herself on board. She allowed herself to breathe only when the bus had finally pulled away, leaving the bar safely behind.

Shit.
Shit
.

Part of her—an unreasonable part which she’d disown once she was back in a more rational frame of mind—was blaming herself. She shouldn’t have gone back after her previous encounters with Gorman. She certainly shouldn’t have gone down into the cellar again. She should have listened to Greg.

But another more sensible part of her was sticking the blame squarely where it belonged—on Gorman. The man had fucking assaulted her. If she hadn’t fought back, Christ knew what might have happened. He was a drunken fucking maniac.