The Skeleton Road (6 page)
Authors: Val McDermid
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #International Mystery & Crime, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General, #Mystery
E
ven Karen’s talent for bending the world to her will wasn’t enough to dig out bank details on a Sunday. She might be able to roust out a cooperative sheriff to sign a warrant, but that wouldn’t really speed anything up and she didn’t want to waste any favours owing on a pointless exercise. She knew River would be in the lab, interrogating the skeleton for information about its origins, but there was nothing she could usefully do there, and besides, River would let her know as soon as she came across anything that would provide a lead. Fraser Jardine’s free-climbing pal hadn’t returned her call. Maybe it was time to give him a wee kick up the bahookey, remind him that ignoring police officers wasn’t such a brilliant idea.
She leaned against the bonnet of the sensible, inconspicuous Ford Focus she had chosen for its anonymity and called Ian Laurie. Just when it seemed the phone was about to go to voicemail, a husky grunt replaced the ring tone.
‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie. Who am I speaking to?’ Karen didn’t have to pretend to sternness.
Throat-clearing, rattle of phlegm. Phil had his faults, she thought. But at least he never made a noise like that in the morning. ‘Is this a wind-up?’ A deep, dark voice. Clearly Fraser Jardine had taken her seriously when Karen had told him to keep his mouth shut about his grisly discovery.
‘This is the police, sir. Are you Ian Laurie?’
‘Aye. But I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Nobody’s accusing you, sir. I left a message on your voicemail yesterday asking you to contact me as a matter of urgency.’
A throaty gurgle of laughter. ‘You’re for real. Fuck. I thought you were one of my pals taking the mince. I’m sorry, officer. I’m not normally this much of a fuckwit. It’s just that I’m getting married in a week and my pals are ripping the piss out of me every chance they get.’
Life in the fast lane, right enough, Karen thought. ‘I am for real, sir. And I do need to talk to you about a serious matter. I’m just down the road. If you’d like to give me your address, I can be with you in about half an hour. I won’t detain you long, but this is most definitely not a taking of the mickey.’ Her tone had an edge of ‘don’t mess with me’ that usually did the trick, particularly with the innocent.
It worked. An hour later, she was toiling up an apparently endless flight of tenement stairs in Gorgie. Why did they always live on the top floor, she wondered, heart rate rising along with the altitude. At least this close was clean; she’d lost count of the number of times she’d tried to climb stairs while holding her breath because of the noxious brew of piss, decaying takeaway food and other things she didn’t want to think too closely about.
The Mint waited by Laurie’s front door for her to catch him up and get her breath back. He looked as happy to have had his Sunday disrupted as she was to have him there. But although there was talk of changing the law, the Scottish system still demanded corroboration at every stage of an inquiry. If Karen walked into Ian Laurie’s flat alone and he confessed to an entire string of murders, it wouldn’t be admissible evidence. In the eyes of the court, she could have simply made it all up. And so she was stuck with sharing her Sunday with the Mint.
Ian Laurie’s living room had a view of chimney pots and sky. Looking out of the window was preferable to the interior. Laurie was wearing baggy sweat shorts and a grey T-shirt advertising a city-centre gym. He had the stringy muscles and skinny build of a distance runner or a climber, but today it was mismatched with yellow-tinged eyes and skin, scrubby black stubble and breath that would have stripped the Forth Bridge back to the bare metal. Karen didn’t envy his wife-to-be.
He waved them towards a baggy leather sofa that looked as if it had originally been expensive but had been serially maltreated. Laurie himself slumped into a matching armchair that faced a vast plasma TV where a fireplace had once stood. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s this serious matter?’ He didn’t look or sound convinced.
‘I’ll get to that in due course,’ Karen said. ‘I wanted to talk to you about something you said to Fraser Jardine.’
Laurie scratched his armpit and yawned. ‘Fraser? What did I say to Fraser?’
‘When he said he was going to the John Drummond School building, one of your mutual pals asked if he was going up from the inside or the outside. And that jogged his memory and he came up with something you’d said about climbing the John Drummond.’
Laurie straightened up and looked wary. ‘Never happened. A wee joke, that’s all.’
‘Mr Laurie, I’m not looking to nick anybody for trespassing. But I am looking for some help. There’s no catch here. I’m just trying to fill in a bit of background.’
‘I’ve never been in the John Drummond,’ he said, quickly and firmly. ‘There’s absolutely nothing I can tell you about the place. Nothing.’
‘What is it you do for a living, Mr Laurie?’ Karen asked casually. The framed monochrome photographs of black jazz musicians that lined the walls were not, she suspected, a clue. More of a style statement.
‘I work for RBS.’ Seeing her lip curl, he added hastily, ‘I’m not a banker. I’m a buildings services executive.’
Karen smiled. ‘What? You count the chairs? Not so many of them as there used to be, I guess. So, like most people you don’t have anything to do with the police on a daily basis. I just want to explain that it’s nothing like the telly. I’m a lot smarter than most of those dozy detectives you see on the box. And I’m a lot less patient. I’m trying to do this the polite and quick way. But we can do it down the police station in a way that’ll make you very late for your work tomorrow.’ She gave him a smile that her colleagues had learned the hard way not to trust.
Laurie looked at the Mint as if he was expecting some male solidarity. The Mint looked stolidly at his feet.
‘I’ve not done anything,’ he said plaintively.
‘Free climbing,’ Karen said. ‘What do you know about free-climbing buildings, Mr Laurie?’
‘I’ve seen videos on YouTube. That kind of thing.’
‘I think you can do better than that. I don’t know why you’re being so cagey, Mr Laurie. I couldn’t give a toss about what you do in your spare time. All I’m trying to do is find out how a murder victim might have got on to the roof of the John Drummond School without any trace of a break-in.’
‘Murder?’ Laurie’s voice was a squeak. ‘You never said it was a murder.’
‘I was trying to spare your feelings. Now, are you going to tell me about the John Drummond or not?’
‘I want a lawyer,’ Laurie stammered.
The Mint looked up. ‘Like the boss said, we’re not accusing you of anything. We’re just looking for information. You get a lawyer, you start to look like a man who’s done something wrong.’
Karen looked at the Mint with new respect. Twice in two days he’d said something that wasn’t stupid. Was there some new drug going the rounds that she hadn’t heard about? ‘So, the John Drummond?’ she said.
Laurie hunched his shoulders and folded his arms. ‘It’s not like we do anybody any harm, right? It’s the challenge.’
Karen wanted to give him a verbal slap but she held back. A bunch of well-heeled boys desperate for a cheap thrill. Not content with bringing the global economy to its knees, they had to go about the place like daft wee boys showing off. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Who’s the “we”?’
‘Me and a couple of guys I was at uni with. We did a bit of climbing back then. Winter climbing in the Highlands, a bit of Alpine stuff. Then we got hooked on free-climbing rock. It’s an amazing feeling. Anyway, about three years ago, there was this BBC series,
Climbing Great Buildings.
Which basically did what it says on the tin. And we started tracking down online vids of people free climbing big buildings.’ His voice tailed off.
‘And then you started doing it?’
Laurie looked sheepish. ‘We weren’t hurting anybody. We did it at night, always out of the way, so we wouldn’t freak anybody out.’
Karen shook her head, despairing at the jackass stupidity of young men. ‘So tell me what you know about the John Drummond.’
He sighed. ‘You get to know people who do the same thing. A lot of them I just know from online. But we share info. Routes to get up difficult buildings, tips for getting past particular obstacles. Somebody from down south was talking about the John Drummond, about how there was pretty much no security and you could get up and down without any fear of getting caught. And how it was really challenging as a climb because there’s a lot of overhangs on the way up. And a guy I know from Glasgow, he chipped in and said he’d done it solo on Midsummer’s Eve when it didn’t even get properly dark and how amazing it had been and the view was great.’ He sighed again. ‘So we did it. And that’s all I know. I don’t know anything about a murder, I swear to God.’
‘So you did go up the John Drummond?’
He nodded. ‘September. Friday the thirteenth. We thought it would be funny to go up when it was supposed to be unlucky.’
‘Did you go on the roof?’
‘Aye, that’s the whole point. You’ve not really climbed it unless you go right the way up.’
The Mint leaned forward, raising a finger for permission to speak. He knew better than to interrupt Karen directly in mid-flow. She nodded. ‘Does that mean you climbed up the wee turrets in the corners?’
‘The pinnacles? Aye, we each did one of them.’
‘Did you go inside any of them?’ Karen was back in the driving seat.
‘Dougie stuck his head in one for a look. But he said there was nothing to see and it was too wee to get inside. So we left it at that and went back down again. Was that where he was, the dead guy? In one of the pinnacles?’ The yellow complexion took on a greenish tinge.
‘Did you ever come across a free climber from the old Eastern bloc?’ Wrong-foot them with the question they don’t expect. That was Karen’s MO.
Laurie looked confused. ‘What? You mean a Russian or something?’
‘Maybe more like the Baltic states. Or the Balkans?’ It dawned on Karen that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d barely have been at primary school when the Balkan conflict had shaken Europe’s postwar consensus. ‘Latvia. Lithuania. Estonia. Croatia. Serbia. Bosnia. Poland, even.’
His face cleared. ‘Right. No, I don’t think I ever have. I’ve messaged with a couple of Americans and New Zealanders, but that’s about it for foreigners.’ He smirked. ‘Unless you count the English.’
That was a record for 2014, Karen reckoned. Almost lunchtime before somebody had given a nod to the upcoming independence referendum. ‘You’re going to have to give us a list of all your free-climbing contacts. DC Murray here will sort that out with you.’
‘How did he die?’
It was the question they always asked. How had the victim’s life been stripped from them. ‘He was shot,’ Karen said. ‘Somebody stood in front of him and pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger.’
The Mint made a gun shape with the first two fingers of his right hand. ‘Boom,’ he said. ‘Just like that. He’ll no’ be doing any more free climbing.’
All that summer, there had been talk of war. At the beginning of June Croatia had seceded from Yugoslavia, determined to escape the domination of the Serbs. But there were enough ethnic Serbs within the borders of the new country to create a groundswell of support for the idea of creating a new Serbian state inside Croatia. It was an idea that had the wholehearted backing of Serbia and of the Yugoslavian armed forces, egged on by Slobodan Milosevic with his strong-arm, strong-man tactics. The clash of aspirations was a recipe for disaster, but I was too young and Melissa was too optimistic to believe the disaster would really happen.
And so when Schollie’s Governing Body put a stop to Melissa’s latest Balkan mission, we saw this as merely a temporary hiccup. In Melissa’s head, her absence would be short-lived and the gap could easily be plugged by a bright post-doctoral research fellow groomed to think in the same way as her mentor. I would lead some seminars, work with the writers of papers, and help to set up courses at the new institutions that would rise from the ashes of the old Communist state. What could possibly go wrong?
For the first few weeks, it seemed as if Melissa might have been right. That all the sabre-rattling would come to nothing. That there was no real appetite for a fight. Yes, there was fighting going on in Vukovar, but that was a long way away and nobody in Dubrovnik seemed to be panicking over it. Dubrovnik didn’t feel scary at all. Not like the trip to Prague I’d taken with Melissa a few years before, when the secret police had come knocking at the door of a house where we’d been leading a clandestine seminar. The hosts had opened a concealed trapdoor in the kitchen floor and bundled us into a damp cellar where the only sound apart from our panicked breathing was the scrabble of rats’ claws on stone and the overhead thuds as they jumped over the joists in the floor above our heads. That had been scary, all right. But by the time I travelled to Dubrovnik, the stranglehold of the Communist state had been broken. We were all Europeans now.
I embraced my new life with open eyes, open arms and open heart. I’d discovered when I escaped Fife and arrived in London that immersing myself completely was the way to make the most of every new experience and I was happy to have the chance to do that again. I was renting a room from Varya, a primary school teacher. Melissa had worked with her on a research project and knew the hard currency I’d be paying for my garret under the eaves would make a difference to her family. I was, I think, the only person who had a room to herself – even Varya’s elderly mother had to share with the ten-year-old daughter of the house.
My room was spartan – a single iron bedstead with a wafer-thin mattress, a plain pine cupboard with shelves and hanging space for three shirts and a jacket, a table barely big enough for an open A4 notebook, and a rickety wooden chair. A crucifix hung above the bed with an emaciated Jesus gazing down mournfully, reflected in the small mirror on the opposite wall so I could see him from my bed. But the view across the city made up for everything. Varya’s house was outside the walled city itself, at the foot of Srdj, the steep ridge above Dubrovnik. At the back of the house, a narrow garden ran to where the pine trees and scrubby undergrowth began. But from my window at the front of the house, I had a panoramic view of the ancient walled city.
Until I saw Dubrovnik, I had no notion of what a walled city really meant. I’d seen a fragment of the wall the Romans had built around London. Six metres high, two and a half metres thick. I thought that was impressive. The walls of Dubrovnik are twenty-five metres high and eight metres thick – between three and four times the scale of London’s defences. Looking down across the patchwork of terracotta roofs and the white hulls of boats in the harbour was an inspirational start to those September days when I was first finding my feet in the city. Some mornings, the sky was a deep unbroken blue, a colour we never see in the UK. On other days, because the summer was drawing to a close, wispy skeins of cloud created a tigerskin sky.
The seminars I was leading had a real sense of liberation about them too. There was an exhilaration in the air after all those years of oppression, but also a kind of disorientation. We take so many of our freedoms for granted; in those early days in Dubrovnik, I saw at first-hand how it was unsettling as well as liberating to have permission to think, write and speak openly. And of course there were plenty of academics around from the Communist era who were clinging grimly to their old jobs and their old ways. Still, what we were doing felt like continuing a revolution.
The sparkle of intellectual independence seemed to light up our social interactions too. Although people’s resources were limited, everyone was eager to find any excuse to get together and have some kind of party. From sedate afternoon teas graced with pastries laden with honey and nuts to raucous drinks parties fuelled by slivovitz and rakija, I had invitations galore.
I was young and eager enough to show up to most of them. I knew this period in Dubrovnik would open up professional possibilities for me – contacts to be made, papers to be written, maybe even a book – and so I wanted to meet as many people as I could. I was surprised at how many knew about the underground university movement, and I was touched by their pleasure in our continued involvement. And so most of my evenings were occupied with these social encounters that constantly opened new areas for my intellectual curiosity to explore.
Melissa had prepared me for that. What she hadn’t prepared me for was love.