Out of Bounds (16 page)

‘Neither do we,’ Karen said with a wry smile.

‘So why do you come out in the night and the rain if you don’t like it?’

She wondered if they were naturally direct, these Syrian men, or if it was simply that they didn’t have the command of the language that would allow them to go all round the houses and tread diplomatically with a stranger. ‘I don’t sleep well. Walking tires me out. Then when I go home, I manage to drop off.’

‘Drop off?’

‘Sleep. It’s an expression that means sleep.’

Tarek nodded, considering, as if filing it away for future use. ‘So why do you not sleep? Do you have bad things on your mind? Bad police things? Are you guilty?’

Karen felt her shoulders rise defensively. ‘I’m not a bad person. I’m not a bad police officer either. But a bad thing happened to the man I loved. Another man killed him.’ She fell silent and stared at the flames.

‘I am sorry,’ Tarek said.

‘So am I. All the time, I’m sorry. And I’m sad too. So I work long hours and I walk half the night to take my mind off what happened.’

‘I understand. You have work instead of your man now.’ Tarek heaved a deep sigh. ‘We have sorrow too. We are sad because people we love are killed in the war. And because our homes are broken and we can’t live there any more. And we have no work to stop us being sad.’

‘That’s hard,’ Karen said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without my work to take my mind off what I’ve lost.’

‘Work is dignity.’ Tarek shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets and scowled at the flames. ‘We have no dignity here.’

‘You’re not allowed to work, are you?’

He
shook his head. ‘Not until we are accepted to stay. It is hard because we are men who work. We are not beggars with our hands out.’ He clapped the flat of one hand on his chest. ‘I am accountant.’ He pointed at the closest of the other two men. ‘He is chef. And he—’ pointing at the third – ‘he is dentist. But here, we are nothing.’

They put her to shame, Karen thought. She’d felt her own life had been emptied out with Phil’s death. But these people had lost so much more. And while she could attempt to move forward with her life, they were in limbo. Desperate to begin again, but stuck fast where they’d landed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

Tarek shook his head. ‘It’s not your blame. You people here in Scotland, you are trying to help. Mostly, you are kind. Some, not so much. But mostly, yes. It’s good to be where there are no bombs or bullets. We are glad for that.’

The man he’d identified as a chef looked Karen in the face for the first time. ‘Why will you not let us work? Always I fed my family. Always I made a roof over the head of my wife and my children. But now we are like babies. I hate it.’ He spat on the ground at his feet. ‘Sometimes I think better to be dead at home than living like this.’ He turned up his coat collar and walked off into the night.

‘He does not mean this,’ Tarek said hastily. ‘He is angry, that’s all.’

Karen sighed. ‘He’s right to be angry, right to be upset. I wish there was something I could do to help, really. Is there anything practical that you need? Food? Clothes? Blankets?’

Tarek’s eyes were heavy with sorrow. ‘We are not hungry. We have clothes. What we need, you cannot give us.’

There was nothing more to be said. Karen stood with the men for a few minutes longer, then said goodnight. She wasn’t sure what she’d gone looking for on the railway path. But she knew she hadn’t found it.

21

I
t
was just before seven when Karen’s phone woke her. A moment of disorientation – there were seldom urgent out-of-hours calls in cold cases – followed by the chill fear that something terrible had happened to one of her parents. Then she registered the name on the screen and swore.

‘Good morning, sir,’ she growled into her phone.

‘Good? What do you mean, good, Pirie? What’s good about it? Have you not seen the papers? It’s all over the bloody internet.’ Judging by the volume, the Macaroon’s face would resemble the mottled palette of a Victoria plum.

Karen rolled upright, sitting on the edge of the bed, awake and alert. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ she stalled. ‘I’ve just this minute woken up.’

‘Then I suggest you find out double quick. My office, eight o’clock. And I’m telling you now, Pirie, this is one step too far after what I said to you the other day.’

Silence. Karen let out a puff of breath and tossed her phone on the bedside table. Bastard, she thought, heading for the bathroom. Whatever was biting the Macaroon in the arse could wait till she’d had her shower and a brew. Everything
looked worse without the mediation of hot water and caffeine, in her experience.

Fifteen minutes later she was in front of her laptop. Showered, dressed and armed with a cup of coffee, how bad could it be?

Very, very bad, was the answer. She didn’t even have to go looking. The Google Alert she had set up a couple of years ago was sitting there in her mailbox, directing her to three Scottish media sites – two newspapers and an internet-based news service. The headlines screamed in her face.

COMA BOY KEY TO MURDER

JOY RIDER DNA UNLOCKS 20-YEAR MYSTERY

And finally, at greater length:
LOVELY TI NA’S MURDERER
–
THE DNA FINGER POINTS AFTER
20
YEARS
. The clever concision of newspaper headlines didn’t apply to the web. Nobody was constrained by the size of the page or the need for big snappy capitals to grab the passing potential reader rushing from bus stop to office.

Karen clicked on the first link, the popular tabloid her parents had read for years before finally giving up in disgust at its relentless parade of reality TV Z-list celebrities and badly behaved footballers with more money than sense. Best to get the worst over with first. Under the screaming headline, she read:

The blood of a teenage joyrider may hold the key to a twenty-year-old unsolved murder, Police Scotland believe.

When the youth’s DNA was analysed after a fatal crash in Dundee last weekend, boffins realised that the killer of blonde hairdresser Tina McDonald was one of his close male relatives.

But hopes that the crime would quickly be solved were dashed when detectives discovered that the youth was adopted at birth.

Now Police Scotland’s Historic Case Unit, led by Detective
Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, faces an uphill struggle to trace the birth parents of the driver, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

At a court hearing earlier this week, lawyers argued that the police should have access to the driver’s original birth certificate. But his adoptive parents, who have kept the truth about his birth a secret from him, complained that this was a breach of his right to privacy and a family life.

Now both sides must await the decision of the sheriff.

Tina McDonald was 24 when she was brutally raped and murdered after a girls’ night out to celebrate the birthday of her friend and boss Liz Dunleavy, owner of a salon in Glasgow’s trendy Byres Road.

Her body was left in an alley behind the former Bluebeard’s night club off George Square in the city centre, her brand-new sequined red dress torn and bloodstained.

Hundreds of witness statements were taken from clubbers and friends of the vivacious young stylist. But no arrest was ever made. Now, police are tantalisingly close to finally closing the case.

At the family home in Mount Florida, Tina’s grieving father Eric said, ‘I can’t believe the police don’t automatically have the right to this information. Surely justice for my wee lassie matters more than the rights of some joyrider who’s already killed three of his pals?

‘Tina’s murder sentenced us to a life of hell. The least the courts can do is give us an answer to who did this.’

DCI Pirie was unavailable for comment last night, but a spokesman for Police Scotland said, ‘We do not comment on ongoing inquiries.’

Karen gave a little snort. ‘Except when it suits us,’ she muttered. She skimmed the other accounts, learning nothing she didn’t know, then googled the story to make sure there
was nothing she’d missed. As she shrugged into her jacket, she took a quick look at Twitter and groaned as she saw #TinaMcDonald was trending locally. The Twitterati were building up a head of righteous indignation. The majority were for justice and Tina, and against the joyrider who’d wiped out three of his pals. But there was a vocal minority who championed his right to a private life even though he’d deprived others of any life at all. It was, Karen thought, enough to make you want to tear up the Human Rights Act.

If only for a moment.

She checked herself in the mirror. It was only the second time she’d worn this suit, a recent concession to the fact that she’d lost weight and everything else was hanging on her. A dark blue herringbone linen mix, it actually made her look presentable. And the shirt she’d treated herself to in the White Stuff sale was a pretty blue-and-white pattern that made her eyes more intense. Not that she was dressing up for the Macaroon. She was meeting Giorsal after work and she had a feeling there might not be time to slip home and change. She wanted to look her best; she didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her. Giorsal probably wouldn’t be like that, but Karen wanted to slip back into their old friendship, not have it undermined with pity before it even got out of the starting blocks. She rubbed a smirr of moulding paste through her ungovernable hair, made sure her bag held life’s necessities and set off to face the dissonance.

Assistant Chief Constable Simon Lees had been stoking his fury ever since he’d glanced at his iPad on waking. Now, an hour and a half later, he resembled a pressure cooker in the instant before the steam pushes the valve open and fills the kitchen with hissing steam. All it needed for him to blow was the arrival of that bloody woman.

This time, she’d crossed the line. She’d presided over an
almighty cock-up. One he’d specifically warned her against. Underneath his simmering rage, there was a twinge of delight that he was in the delicious position of being fully entitled to give her a full metal jacket bollocking.

He sipped his green tea and looked at his watch. One minute to go. She’d be late. She was always late. She made a point of claiming to have so much on her plate she’d lost track of time. He had time to rein in his anger and maintain the pretence of calm. He flicked open his iPad and clicked on the RPG combat game he’d become mildly addicted to. Enough time had surely passed for him to improve the strength of the main gate to his compound.

But before he could click on the icon, there was a knock on the door. As usual, Pirie didn’t wait to be invited. She was in the door, across the room and in the chair while he was still desperately trying to shut down his game. He thought he’d managed it, but when he looked back at her, there was the faintest of smiles on her face.

‘What the bloody hell is going on here?’ No preamble, straight for the jugular. Lees took the tabloid from his top drawer and slammed it on the table in front of Karen, face up. ‘I warned you about leaks. I told you specifically to get your house in order. And what do I wake up to? All hell breaking loose.’

A moment’s silence while Karen cast an eye over the paper. ‘I don’t know where that came from, but it didn’t come from my office.’

‘Well, where the hell else could it have come from?’

Karen shrugged. ‘Colin Semple’s office. Sheriff Abercrombie’s clerk. Alexandra Cosgrove’s office. A court usher. The parents of Tina McDonald. You’ve got no grounds for assuming that it came from me or from DC Murray. We’re the ones with most to lose, for one thing.’

‘Really? You’re not interested in the glory, DCI Pirie? Leaking
at this stage means you get the credit for not giving up on Tina McDonald, but if it all goes wrong, it’s the system and not you to blame.’

She looked at him as if she wanted to punch him. He had her on the run now, he could sense it. Why had it taken him so long to figure out that her professional vanity was her Achilles’ heel? He felt a smirk coming on but he forced his mouth to stay still. When she spoke, her voice was low and venomous. ‘The only thing I care about is putting criminals behind bars. Tina McDonald’s killer has been walking around for twenty years thinking he’s got away with it. Now he knows we’ve got a line on him. And he also knows that we can’t do a bloody thing about it till the sheriff gives us the green light. Do you really think he’s still going to be around when we come knocking? Believe me, nobody is more pissed off about this than I am.’

She had a point, he had to admit. But still he thought she was the one who came out of this with most kudos. And that was what drove her, he was sure of it now. ‘So you say,’ he snapped, enunciating each word with precision. ‘But I can’t just take your word for it. We need to find out who is leaking this stuff to the press. It’s not in the interests of that justice you’re so very self-righteous about. So, I’m instituting a leak inquiry.’

She sighed. He was winning. She was on the run now. Time for the killer blow. ‘I’ll be briefing Detective Superintendent Gordon Robson shortly.’ She couldn’t hide the look of dis may. Her former boss. A man who was almost as fond of her as he was. Gordon Robson would make Pirie’s life a misery, Lees would bet a year’s salary on it. ‘He’ll get to the bottom of this.’

‘If you say so.’

She never sirred him. No respect. Well, he’d enjoy watching Gordon Robson bringing her down. In spite of her
protestations, he was convinced the leak began and ended in Karen Pirie’s office. ‘He’ll need access to all your phone records and emails. Both you and DC Murray.’

Karen snorted. ‘Well, that should induce a coma. I can’t speak for Jason, but my life is an open book. I’d have thought there were better ways for DS Robson to spend his time, but be my guest.’ She stood up. ‘If that’s all, I need to get back to work. I’ve got a murder to solve.’

And to his immense frustration, she walked out as if the bollocking had never happened.

22

K
aren
found Jason in their office, whey-faced and shaky, poring over the morning papers. ‘You look like you had a good night last night,’ Karen said, throwing her jacket over the back of her chair and slumping in front of the computer. ‘I’m glad one of us did.’