Out of Bounds (37 page)

‘If he didn’t, we won’t pin it on him for the sake of getting a conviction,’ Karen said. ‘I promise you that.’

‘And if he did, he got away with it, which means my mum was spared twenty years of shame. I can’t say I’m sorry about that.’ Foreman straightened up. ‘Are we done here? Only we need to be on patrol and my partner can’t do anything while I’m here with you.’

Karen gestured towards the door. ‘You’re free to go. Thanks for your help.’

They watched him go, then Karen said, ‘Away and find his boss and tell him we want to know if Foreman does anything out of character. Till we get that DNA result back, I’m not taking anything on trust.’

The journey back across the narrow waist of the Central Belt seemed to take for ever. Roadworks, the ever-expanding rush hour, the detour via the lab at Gartcosh to drop off the DNA sample and finally the run out to the evidence store to collect six cardboard archive boxes of files from the store. ‘That’s the
digest,’ the helpful warehouse clerk volunteered. ‘There’s a whole stack of the original unedited witness statements, but I thought you’d be able to make a start with these. If you need more, we can always dig it out for you. No bother.’

By the time they got back to base and Jason had loaded the files into their office to spare her shoulder, he was starting to look frayed round the edges. ‘Away home,’ Karen told him. ‘We’ll be off to Linlithgow in the morning, so make sure you get here in good time.’

Jason eyed the archive boxes dubiously. ‘Are you going to make a start on them tonight?’

‘I was considering it.’

‘It’s not my place, boss, but I think you should maybe take an early bath. After last night, I mean. You look kind of rough. Tired,’ he hastily corrected himself, seeing the look on her face. ‘Most folk wouldn’t have come in today if somebody had walloped them with a wing mirror on the way to trying to kill them.’

He had a point, she realised. But she wasn’t most folk, and she had no confidence in her capacity for rest these days. ‘I thought I’d just look for the DNA profiles,’ she said. ‘I photographed the ones from Gabriel Abbott’s letter and sent them to River last night. I need to give her something to compare them with.’

Jason lifted the first box on to his desk. ‘I’ll give you a hand, then. But only if you promise you’ll knock off when we find them.’ He gave her an uncertain grin, not sure if he’d overstepped the mark.

Karen had an unsettling moment of recognition. What Jason had said was the sort of thing that Phil would have said back when they all worked together. She nearly tucked it away without further examination, but then she remembered Jason’s plaintive words. She really should try harder. So, ‘That’s the kind of deal Phil would have made,’ she said.

Jason’s eyes flared with panic, then he realised she was reaching out to him. He came up with a tentative smile. ‘I managed to learn some things from him.’ He propped the box lid with its index list against his monitor and started sifting through the files. ‘The first round’s on you. That’s one of the other things I learned from him.’

Karen couldn’t help smiling. A poignant, sad smile, but a smile nonetheless. It was a start. She sat on the floor next to one of the boxes, trying not to grimace as her shoulder complained. She began the slow task of sorting the paperwork. They had a system they’d developed over the years. It involved a series of piles. Evidence, crime scene photographs, analysis, witness statements, suspect details. Then those piles themselves were sorted into separate stacks, depending on how Karen and Jason were approaching the material. Sometimes they arranged them by date, sometimes by subject, sometimes by individuals. It was Karen’s idiosyncratic method and Jason, trained up in it since he’d joined the unit, had adopted it uncritically.

So they worked through the paperwork, which seemed to have been dumped in the boxes at random, no organising principle apparent. ‘This is chaos,’ Jason complained.

‘It was a big case,’ Karen said. ‘There will have been a lot of people working on different bits of it. And there will have been a review at some point, which is why the index sheets in the lids have no relationship to what order things are in, or even if they’re in the right boxes.’ She tutted. ‘I don’t know why people can’t put things back where they found them,’ she muttered.

Halfway through the second box, she found what she was looking for. There, in a plastic envelope, were the DNA profiles of all four victims of the Cessna crash. It was how they’d confirmed their identities. Samples had been taken from their homes – hairbrushes, toothbrushes, laundry baskets – and
compared to the DNA extracted from the fragments of flesh and bone that had rained down on a Borders hillside. ‘Got them,’ she said. ‘You can stop now.’

Jason looked up, a dazed expression in his eyes. ‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve found the DNA. You can knock it on the head for tonight.’

He gave her the straightforward smile of a child. ‘Brilliant. I was kind of lost in what I was looking at. I’m glad I wasn’t one of the guys on the ground after that. Bits of bodies and bits of plane, like the world’s worst jigsaw.’

Karen got up, making what she called ‘old people noises’ as the pain kicked in again. ‘You and me both. I need to scan Caroline and Ellie’s DNA profiles and send them off to River. It’s a Wednesday, she’ll still be in the lab. Then we can go to the pub. Just for one, mind, because you’re driving back to Kirkcaldy.’

He curled his lip in an expression of disgust. ‘I need to sort out someplace else to live. It’s great getting my breakfast cooked, but it’s too much hassle to drive back and forward every day. I’ll start looking at the weekend.’

‘No more students, though, Jason. Maybe it’s time you started thinking about buying?’

He looked aghast. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘Buying? That’s for grown-ups.’

Karen laughed as she laid Caroline Abbott’s profile on the glass plate of the scanner. ‘You are a grown-up now, Jason. Time to take responsibility for yourself.’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll leave that to you, boss. You’re better at it than me.’

She scanned the second sheet, shaking her head. ‘I’ll tell you a secret, Jason. I just talk a better game. Deep down, I’m as scared as everybody else.’

49

D
r
River Wilde was indeed still in the lab. Whenever she was in Dundee, she worked as long as she could bear, partly to justify the deal she’d negotiated with the university and partly because there was nothing to love about the tiny modern studio flat she was renting near the Victoria Dock. She was eating pizza at her desk while reading a revised PhD thesis on the chemical analysis of tooth enamel when Karen’s message pinged into her inbox.

She opened the attachments and sent them to the printer, thoughtfully chewing a chunk of crust as she read the email. She set the PhD to one side and summoned up the DNA analysis of Frank the dog’s DNA, which had come back from the vet school that afternoon with the comment, ‘Doesn’t look much like a dog to me!’

Now she had five DNA profiles to compare. So that she wouldn’t prejudge that comparison, Karen had not told her who they belonged to. The two she’d sent from her phone were labelled A and B; the two she’d just sent over were C and D. And of course, there was Frank the dog.

River
laid the five sheets in front of her. They looked like elongated barcodes. To the untrained eye, there was little connectivity between them. But although it wasn’t her area of specialism, River had been looking at DNA comparisons for years and she’d learned how to make sense of the patterns.

She moved them around so they formed different relationships to one another. And finally, she had the patterns clear in her head. In all probability, C was the mother of A, whose father’s DNA was not one of the selection in front of her: B was the child of D and Frank the Dog. A and B were completely unrelated.

She double-checked her findings then put them together in an annotated email attachment to Karen. Hope this is helpful, she added in her message. Give me a call if you need to talk it through.

Almost instantly, River’s FaceTime icon started chirruping at her. She connected with Karen, who looked both exhausted and excited. ‘Thanks for this,’ she said. ‘I just need to run through it with you to be sure I’ve got it right.’

‘OK. But you look more like you need to be in bed,’ River said.

‘I had a wee run-in with an SUV late last night.’

‘What? You had an accident in the car?’

‘I had an accident, but I wasn’t in the car. Somebody tried to run me over. If it hadn’t been for a patrol car coming along in the nick of time, they’d probably have managed it.’

‘Jesus, Karen, that’s terrible. Who the hell was it? Do you know?’

‘I’ve no idea. The main suspect in the cold case I’m working officially is probably dead, so I don’t think it’s him. If I’ve stirred things up in the Gabriel Abbott case, I don’t have a clear enough idea of where I’m going with it to know who might be trying to stop me.’

River
gave a shaky laugh. ‘You’d better get a move on before they succeed, girl. Did they catch them?’

‘No. By the time the night patrol boys realised what had happened, they were long gone.’

‘Where was this?’

‘Near Kinross. Loch Leven side.’

‘Could they not have checked the ANPR cameras?

Karen shrugged. ‘No point. He could have gone six different roads within five minutes of where it happened.’

‘Oh, come on, Karen. Stop being so bloody heroic. Kinross late at night isn’t the bloody North Circular. Even that close to Perthshire, there can’t be many SUVs hurtling around late at night. Get on to it. Talk to the guys at Traffic. Whoever tried this might try again.’ River’s voice rose in anger. ‘I don’t want to be going to another bloody funeral.’

Karen looked shocked. ‘I’ll be careful,’ she protested.

‘Phil was careful.’ River spoke quietly and clearly.

‘I know,’ Karen said. ‘Every time I woke up in the night, I relived the moment when that SUV was heading for me and I was thinking, this is what Phil felt before he didn’t feel anything ever again. And that’s why I’ll be careful.’

‘Careful isn’t enough. You need to get Traffic on to this. Promise me you’ll do it.’

Karen looked away. ‘I will. OK? I will.’

‘So did they actually hit you? Because you look very pale and you’re holding yourself awkwardly.’

‘The wing mirror caught my shoulder, that’s all. Look, it’s only bruised. Nothing’s broken. And I have cases to work. Cases the Mint can’t manage on his own. Cases like this one. I need you to run me through this, to make sure I’m understanding it. What you sent me is clear, but I need to be certain I’m on solid ground before I start acting on it.’ She drank from a tumbler of clear liquid with bubbles studding the glass.

‘Good
painkiller, gin,’ River said drily. ‘Just don’t use too much of it.’

‘What, not unless you or Jimmy Hutton is around to share it?’ Karen chuckled. ‘So, take me through your results.’

‘As you know, I did the comparisons blind. I don’t know who any of these people are. C is the mother of A. The father isn’t present in this group of profiles.’

‘That’s Carolyn Abbott, Will Abbott’s mother. The father was presumably her husband Tom but he’s been dead since the mid 1980s and there’s no prospect of getting his DNA now. But B definitely isn’t her son?’

‘That’s right. B – is that Gabriel Abbott, then?’

‘Yes. And D is Ellie MacKinnon, Caroline Abbott’s bidie-in. And they’re definitely mother and son?’

‘That’s right. And Frank the dog is his father.’

‘So two boys who have grown up thinking they were full brothers are completely unrelated?’

‘That’s what the science says. But of course, biology isn’t the determinant of family relationships that it once was.’

‘No, but when it comes to matters of inheritance, blood is still thicker than just about anything else.’

‘You look pensive.’

‘I’m going to have to go away and think about what this means and how it comes together,’ Karen said slowly.

‘If you need to talk it over, I’ll be here. I’ll maybe stop off on my way south tomorrow night, if you like? Take a look at your shoulder?’

Karen nodded. ‘At this point, there’s no reason why not. I can buy you dinner, say thanks for sorting this out for me.’

‘Works for me. We’ll talk tomorrow. And Karen?’

‘Yes, I know,’ she sighed. ‘Talk to Traffic.’

River broke the connection and tried to refocus on the PhD. But she couldn’t help fretting about her friend. Karen had always been a law unto herself. But River had hoped
that if Phil’s death had taught her one thing, it was that she wasn’t invulnerable. Right now, it didn’t look as if that lesson had taken very well.

Normally, Karen would have ventured back out into the night to walk through what she knew and what she surmised in the light of that information. But her whole body felt bruised and shaken. Even walking around the flat was uncomfortable. Instead, she ran a hot bath, topped up her glass with the appropriately named Bathtub Gin, put her Blue Nile playlist on shuffle and settled down to try to make sense of what had happened twenty-two years ago and whether it had any connection other than familial with Gabriel Abbott’s death.

Twenty-two years ago, four people had been murdered. Everyone had jumped to the obvious conclusion – that it had been orchestrated by Irish terrorists. There were good reasons for that assumption. Richard Spencer had been a Northern Ireland minister, hated by Republican sympathisers on principle. The IRA had been active around that time, with some very high-profile bombings. It was a convenient place to lay blame when there were no other obvious suspects.

But there were arguments that ran counter to that reasoning. First, the failure of any group to claim responsibility. Terrorists generally liked to shout their triumphs from the rooftops. It was part of the way in which they spread terror. It was also how they bolstered their own feelings of power.

Secondly, in spite of the best efforts of Special Branch and the anti-terrorism unit, there was no evidence of the security at the aerodrome having been breached. Admittedly, it was hardly the tightest of cordons, but because it was a relatively small airfield, strangers who had no business to be there were easy to spot. It wasn’t impossible that a terrorist had managed to get on to the airfield and into the hangar where Richard Spencer’s plane was housed, but according to the files she’d
already skimmed that afternoon, the general feeling was that it would have posed problems. But of course, someone had planted an incendiary device on the plane, so the security must have been breached somehow.