Blood, Salt, Water (16 page)

Flashes of light blossomed behind his lids as he bucked into her mouth, long-term tension pulsing out through his cock. He caught his breath and his work-obsessed mind finished the thought – he didn’t need to come in tomorrow because the girls would do the washing up in the morning.

Fuck. He opened his eyes. Fuck. Even a blow job from a stranger was ruined by intrusive notes about the fucking staff rota. He was wired and angry again. A waste of a crime.

He looked down and saw Miss Grierson pull away. Then she did a very odd thing. It happened so quickly, just a second. Boyd instantly blinked, rerunning the action in his head, teasing the different movements apart because they didn’t seem to fit together: first, she twisted away from him, turning the full three-sixty, fishing in her mouth for something. Then she turned back to face him and her hand was at her side, her face a picture of innocence. An air hostess smile, devoid of personal feeling, an obligation.

Boyd opened his eyes. It was odd because the movement was so fluid. It seemed – he couldn’t think of the word for a second but then it came to him –
professional
.

Time lag. Time slips. He hadn’t taken cocaine for a long time but did remember time slips. This didn’t feel like that though. Didn’t have the guillotined sharpness in the middle.

Miss Grierson stood up and smiled at him. A silver trail across her cheek caught the light. She had a little snowy rim on her nostril.

‘Let’s go to my house,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got plans for you.’

He glanced down and saw a baggy condom in her hand. She saw him looking at it. ‘Dental dam,’ she said. ‘HIV.’

It wasn’t a dental dam, though. It was a female condom, sort of. But shorter, sort of?

Boyd took his key out of the door shutter and stood up.

Now that, just there, that was a time slip. That did feel like a cut-out bit. He couldn’t work out why that mattered really, until he turned and saw her smiling as she walked away uphill. Miss Grierson. For fuck’s sake. Walking time lag.

Side by side, they took the wide road diagonally, each with their hands deep in their pockets, staying wide of each other in case they were spotted. Down a back road towards her house. Why had they gone uphill, he wondered, as they walked through moonshadows from overhanging trees. Her house was downhill from the café. Was it a short cut?

‘Did you see someone down there?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘Why are we going this way?’

‘Just . . . I like this.’ She drew an arc over her head. ‘The trees.’ She smiled away from him, her eyes lingering on his face. Everything felt weird now. He was cold, she was odd. Was she a prostitute? What had she done for a living in America? In London?

‘What did you do for a living in America!’ He meant to ask her casually but it came out like a demand for payment.

‘In America?’

‘Yeah.’

They walked on for a bit.

‘School teacher!’ She sounded exclamatory herself, as if she was shouting a joke. But she wasn’t smiling.

‘Oh.’

They carried on, crossing so they were walking next to a high wall into someone’s garden, on the grassy verge, even though the road was empty. They were keeping in the shadows, him following her. She did not want to be seen with him. That made him feel more comfortable. She was secretive. That was good.

He followed her across the road, down the side of her family grounds, through a garden gate at the side, which was fitted with a new padlock.

The gate shut behind him and Boyd found himself in the Grierson’s massive garden. Everything was dead. Trellises of desiccated vine skeletons were nailed to the back wall. It looked like a vegetable torture chamber.

She saw him looking and dropped her hand to her side, the keys jangled in her hand.

‘Lovely,’ said Boyd of the midnight garden.

She looked at it and her lip curled distastefully.

‘Don’t you like it?’

She shrugged a shoulder. ‘What’s the point of it?’

‘Making something.’ He smiled. ‘The point is a lovely garden.’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘Yeah, I’ve never seen a gardener enjoy a garden, have you? It’s never finished. They can’t stop. It’s work that makes work. Bit bloody pointless to me.’

He felt weird hearing her say that. It sounded so nihilistic, so contrary to all of the given values in this place.

They looked at each other in the dark, her face up to meet his, her eyes sad initially, becoming amused as the look lasted too long to mean nothing.

‘What are we doing here?’ asked Boyd.

‘Having a dirty little fuck?’ She laughed, self-mocking, sweet, and he realised the sinister overtone was just a mixture of coke and tiredness and worry because he’d never done this before. But he was enjoying it. And he’d done it now. And it wasn’t going to get any better or worse if he left right away. And she had made him cum so he sort of owed her.

‘Let’s go inside,’ he said.

She squinted down the garden. ‘You sure? You’re married. I’m not.’

‘Is that an issue for you?’

She looked at the keys in her hand, separating them, laying them out on her palm. ‘I’ve decided: I’m leaving. I don’t belong here any more. I don’t know where I do belong, but not here. Tonight I just want a bit of a high and a little fuck.’ She looked at him, pleadingly. ‘No bullshit afterwards.’

Something had happened to her, he could see it in her eyes. She’d had an affair and got burned. Boyd thought maybe the man told his wife. The wife would be angry. The wife would have blamed Susan and all she wanted was a fuck and a bit of tenderness and it was a damn shame.

Boyd bent down to kiss her on the lips. As he did, he felt a salt glaze of dried sweat crack on the back of his neck. His T-shirt, heavy with perspiration from the evening’s work, peeled away from one of his underarms.

Boyd wanted more coke. He wanted a bit of tenderness and a nice, uncomplicated fuck that didn’t have to be negotiated for with promises of time back for yoga practice. He wanted those things so much it didn’t occur to him to wonder why Miss Grierson was moved to fuck a sweaty married guy, on the floor of her mother’s conservatory, next to a hole in the floor that was shaped like an open grave.

Three fire engines were already addressing the blaze, but here came another. The fourth engine, heard in the distance, was coming from another station. The ear-splitting alarm came closer and closer until it was so loud Iain felt it in his eyes.

The Sailors’ Rest was spewing smoke and flames out into the night. Firemen in beige jumpsuits unravelled hoses, adopting long-rehearsed formations around the engines. A warning call, lost in the howl of the fire, heralded the water and they fired it over the roof, controlling it.

Fresh water. It was useless.

Iain was wet. He didn’t know if it was sea or spray from the hose. He leaned against the side of the building, facing the fire, his eyes smarting, his feet numb.

He watched, oblivious to the firemen shouting at him to get out of the street.

He ignored the police who arrived after the fire had been put out, when the smoke was thin and miserly and the street awash with blackened water.

He stayed as the ambulances arrived, two of them, and he watched them load the black body bags, one big, one small, and he watched them leave.

And by then it was three a.m. and he didn’t know if he could stand any more. His feet were numb. His knees buckled. He slid onto his side on the cold wet pavement. She began to gnaw through his chest.

22

Morrow liked to get into the office ten minutes early to clear her head of shopping lists and resentments, politics and bullshit; to read reports and think. Reading and thinking were unquantifiable in budgetary terms so she had to do them in her own time. It was rare nowadays, with the boys up so early, but she’d managed it today. She tapped her computer out of sleep mode and opened her email. A Met report of yesterday’s interview with Maria Arias.

Maria admitted meeting with Roxanna Fuentecilla the evening before. Roxanna came to her house, here, in Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair. Roxanna was upset because she had argued with her partner, Robin. She missed her London friends and needed a chat with a girlfriend,
You know how girls are?
Morrow despised Arias’s faux girlishness. She was kicking fifty up the arse, for Christ’s sake. Ms Arias was at pains to point out to the officers that Mr Walker was much younger than her friend and probably just after her money. Arias knew that Roxanna Fuentecilla had no money of her own but the Met officers didn’t know. They hadn’t been briefed about Arias putting up the money for the business in Glasgow so they hadn’t questioned her any further about it. They hadn’t asked anything useful. They just listened to her excuses and left.

An addendum to the Met report was marked ‘controlled access’ and warned ‘DI Alec Morrow’ not to divulge the information in it to her crew or anyone not specifically notified by the investigation team. She had to type in her warrant card number and personal password to get it open. It informed her that the Fraud Office were on the brink of seizing the Ariases’ bank accounts, business and private. This department did know that Arias had put up the money for the Glasgow business and they wanted it all back. As soon as Fuentecilla was located, dead or alive, they were to be notified immediately.

Morrow read the addendum again. Police Scotland wouldn’t be getting any of the proceeds. The money was being ring-fenced for either Fraud or the Met, she couldn’t work out which.

On the last page of the same secret report there was a one-word response to Morrow’s speculation about Fuentecilla’s disappearance, the deliberate use of the seven-year sleeping period and the transfer of property back after the Declaration of Death under Scots law:
unlikely
. They hadn’t even bothered to capitalise it.

She googled the book from Delahunt’s desk the day before –
Property Trusts and Succession
– and followed a link to the Presumption of Death (Scotland) Act 1977. A summary of the legislation said that the person had to be missing for seven years with no sightings. The declaration could be raised earlier, but there had to be good reason to assume they had died. The action could only be raised by someone who had been resident in Scotland for a year. She couldn’t see Robin Walker staying on if Roxanna was missing long-term. Morrow’s guess was that they’d be counting on Delahunt, which meant he was in it up to his ears.

They had set it up perfectly. Roxanna had to disappear under suspicious circumstances so they could argue later that she had died, but not suspicious enough to prompt an investigation. Serious crime wouldn’t normally be investigating an abandoned car. They were only involved because of the proceeds trail. She felt she had stumbled on an as-yet uncharted scam, but the Met had deemed it
unlikely
. She shut the file, as requested, and watched as the system locked it.

She had three minutes of thinking time left before the start of her shift. She sat with her face in her hands and tried to imagine a timeline for Roxanna’s disappearance. Roxanna got up and got the kids ready Danny. Shit. Roxanna got up and Danny. Shit. Danny got up and got the kids ready and. Morrow looked up. Do it now.

She phoned the Southern General and asked for his ward. A nurse told her that Danny was stable. He’d had ‘a good night’. She carried on describing the nature of his ‘good night’: good respiration, no complications from surgery, but Morrow was lost in the familiar phrase. Her oldest son had died when he was two and a half. A ‘good night’ was her fondest hope at one time. Just for one nurse or a doctor to smile at her when she came in to take over from Brian, for someone to say Gerald had a good night instead of ‘unfortunately’ and ‘I’m afraid’. Danny McGrath didn’t deserve good nights, but Morrow reminded herself that health was nothing to do with justice. The nurse said she could visit her brother but would need security clearance and would have to ‘stand outside a physical barrier’.

Morrow thanked him and asked what had happened. Danny had been stabbed with a chair leg. His spleen had been removed. No, it wasn’t an essential organ.

Morrow hung up, feeling slightly less guilty than before.

Three days ago Roxanna got up and got the kids ready and drove them to school. She fought with the kids in the car: was their father having an affair? Maria was attractive. Roxanna dropped the kids and drove to London to confront Maria. She came back late, overnight, but didn’t go home to see her kids or phone to reassure them. She went to an empty field in Helensburgh and evaporated.

Morrow moved on to the file on the body in the loch yesterday. She ran and reran the footage from the golf course security camera for the morning. It told an interesting story. The forensics on Mr Cole’s boat had found clumps of the dead woman’s hair trapped in a cleat on the deck. They were testing for blood residue but the boat had been hosed down.

Gruesome photographs of the body in situ, on the dock, then lying on a slab. She was mumsy, Glaswegian. She looked like every dumpy woman in every queue in every supermarket in the city. The night shift had checked: her fingerprints were not on file and no one fitting her description had been reported missing.

Morrow pulled up the effects photographs. She looked again at a thumbnail of the Injury Claims 4 U lanyard. Another scaled photograph was a close-up of a necklace she had been wearing. It was a gold chain, nothing special, with a crucifix and a Star of David threaded together. Mixed marriage or hedging her bets on the afterlife, maybe.

The report on Fuentecilla’s car was more interesting. The food bag from the glovebox had nearly two grams of what, superficially, was cocaine. It was enough for a fairly extravagant night, or a long drive back from London, but it was a personal-use amount. It wasn’t enough for a dealer. There were a couple of good prints on the outside of the bag and they had been lifted and were being run this morning. Morrow was right about one thing: the car had been cleaned with alcohol wipes.

Morrow sat back and closed her eyes: wipes were professional, but only quite
professional. It would have been less clumsy to leave no trace, no alcohol residue. The clumsiness could be deliberate, so that Delahunt had ‘suspicious circumstance’ to support an early Declaration of Death. But maybe she was giving them too much credit. Maybe it was
unlikely.

She dialled Simmons’ office number, realising after the first ring that it was seven a.m. and Simmons probably wouldn’t be in. But Simmons did answer, helloing with a resigned sigh.

‘Simmons? I was going to leave a message. I didn’t think you’d be in yet.’

‘I’m not “in yet”. I haven’t been home
yet
. We had a fire in the town. Two dead, father and young daughter.’

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah,’ said Simmons.

‘Domestic?’

‘Commercial property.’

‘Insurance claim?’ Morrow asked hopefully.

‘Unlikely. The owner had remortgaged his house to pay for building work, they were nearly finished. He was inside with his daughter and they died in the fire.’

‘Accelerant?’

‘Lots. Fire service say there were petrol fumes everywhere but we’ll have to wait for chemical analysis to be sure. Anyway, what did you call for? Is it urgent because I’d like to get back.’

‘Sure.’ Morrow sat back. ‘The golf course body traces back to our case. We’ll be taking it.’

Simmons was so relieved that she sounded almost pleasant, but not quite. When Morrow told her she was about to interview Andrew Cole, Simmons grunted OK and hung up.

Morrow walked briskly through the front lobby, down past the locker rooms to the back bar and the holding cells.

The desk sergeant was at his post, bright and perky despite being at the end of a long night shift.

‘Ma’am.’

‘Is Andrew Cole awake yet?’

He glanced at a computer screen below the lip of the desk. ‘There he is, having a wee cup of tea.’

Morrow slipped around the back of the desk and looked at the screen. Andrew Cole was sitting on a bare plastic mattress, sipping from a large tin mug.

‘What happened to his bed sheets?’

‘Had to take them out.’ George looked at the night log on another screen, running his finger down to the right entry:‘At . . . five oh eight a.m., when “Mr Cole became very disturbed and there was some concern for his safety”.’ He smiled and looked up.

Morrow was surprised. ‘Suicide watch?’

George gave a dismissive wave. ‘
Very
briefly. Probably the wrong call but better safe than sorry.’

Back on the screen Cole sipped from his mug. He seemed calm now. ‘What was he doing to make you think that?’

George read again: ‘A lot of “shouting” and “swearing”, “banging on the cell door”. Said he “couldn’t stand it”, “wanted his mum to die”, mad stuff like that.’ He shook his head. ‘Wee bit of concern. It passed quickly. He’s never slept since then.’

On the screen in a fog of grainy grey, Andrew Cole took another sip and looked into his mug of tea. If he was on suicide watch the tea would be lukewarm at best. Still he cupped it between two hands, trying to warm himself.