Candles and Roses (13 page)

‘If you like,’ he said, now, grudgingly. He felt a tightening in his chest even at the prospect. ‘We could give it a go.’

‘It might help.’

‘If it’s what you want.’

She banged her glass on the coffee table, spilling wine on to the polished surface. ‘For Christ’s sake, Alec, it’s not what I want. It’s what might be good for us. For our marriage.’

‘I’ve said I’ll do it, haven’t I?’

‘Aye, in the same way that you might have agreed to having your bollocks removed without anaesthetic.’

‘Well, what do you expect? I can’t pretend to be comfortable with the idea. But if you think it’s the right thing to do—’

‘It’s not what I think. It’s what we both think.’

‘I think it’s time we faced facts, Chrissie. It wasn’t either of our faults. It was just one of those things.’

‘How can you say that? About your own daughter? “Just one of those things”?’

‘Oh, Christ, you know what I mean. There’s nothing either of us could have done.’

‘We could have given her a reason to stay here. We could have stopped it ever happening.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Chrissie. She left home. She grew up and she flew the fucking nest. It’s what children do.’

‘Not if you give them a reason to stay. She walked out the first chance she got.’

‘And could you blame her? The way we were. The way we still are.’

There was a prolonged silence, both of them conscious they were on the verge of saying things they were likely to regret.

Finally, Chrissie said: ‘She
died
, Alec. She fucking killed herself because she wasn’t here. Because she had no-one. Because she was on her own in a big city.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Chrissie. We don’t know that. And even if she did, we can’t begin to speculate why she did it. She suffered from depression. We knew that. We just didn’t realise how serious it was.’

‘We should have fucking realised,’ she said. ‘We should have known. We were her fucking parents, for Christ’s sake. We should never have let it happen.’

‘But—’ There was no point, he thought. We both know, objectively, there was nothing we could have done. Not then. Not by the time it happened. What we don’t know—what we can never know—is whether we could have done something before then. Whether we could have done more to help her. We tried. We did our best. But maybe, as it turned out, our best just wasn’t anything like good enough. ‘Look, you’re right,’ he said. ‘Let’s give it a go. Let’s try the counselling.’

‘And you think that’ll do it, do you?’ Chrissie said, bitterly. ‘You really think that’ll be enough to wash all this away?’

He held himself back from pointing out that it had been her idea, that just a few minutes before she’d been attacking him for his reluctance to accept it. This wasn’t about reason. This was about working through fears and emotions that neither of them fully understood.

‘No,’ he said, finally. ‘No, I don’t think that. But we’ve nothing else, Chrissie. It’s all we’ve fucking got.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

To McKay’s surprise, early the next morning he received an e-mail from DI Warren of Greater Manchester Police. ‘Everything I could track down,’ it said, simply. ‘Hope it’s some use.’

There was a zip file attached containing a number of documents. McKay clicked on a couple. As far as he could see, Warren had sent, in scanned form, the full contents of Katy Scott’s file. There wasn’t a lot, and most of it related to her being reported as missing. Statements from her landlord and from the neighbour who’d first raised concerns about her absence. Statements from a couple of other neighbours in the same converted house. Nothing that, at first glance, seemed likely to shed much light on the case other than providing a few more contact names and addresses.

Still, it was good of Warren to take the trouble, particularly to do it personally. Given that the two forces were now liaising on the case at senior level, it was possible that some pressure had been placed on him to be co-operative. McKay didn’t much care as long as it achieved the desired effect.

Helena Grant turned up later in the morning to do a walkabout among the troops. Afterwards, she sat herself down in McKay’s office. Horton was out somewhere conducting an interview.

‘You’ve a decent bunch there,’ she said.

‘Aye, I’m happy. Mostly your efforts, that. I can see you’ve pulled a few strings to get people released.’

‘Called in a few favours,’ she said. ‘But people are usually keen to help in a case like this.’

‘Must be causing a few jitters out there,’ he said. ‘Killer on the loose and all that.’

‘Media are starting to stir it up a bit,’ she agreed. ‘And it won’t get any better. We’ve set up a press conference for this afternoon. Update on progress.’

‘You want me there?’

She considered. ‘Plan is for the chief super and me to lead it,’ she said. ‘Some of that lot are very good at adding two and two together and getting twenty-five.’

‘I’ll stay out of it, then,’ McKay said. ‘You know me. Someone starts talking shite, I’m likely to tell them.’

‘Aye, Alec,’ she said. ‘And that’s why they’ve never made you chief media officer, I’m guessing.’

‘I don’t have the face for television,’ he said. ‘That’s the only reason.’

They spent an hour or so working on the statement that she was going to make and brainstorming the questions that might be thrown at her. At the end of it, McKay said: ‘Jesus, Helena, I’m awful glad you like doing this stuff. This is your game, not mine.’

‘Horses for courses. If I can keep the media sweet—well, sweetish—I’m more than happy to do it. We want them onside in this one if we can. This is one where we really do need whatever information we can get from the public.’

‘We’ve fuck all else at the moment, other than a few names and addresses.’

After Grant had gone, he went back to the material Warren had sent up. The statements from the landlord and neighbour were both pretty bland—largely ‘she kept herself to herself’ stuff. The neighbour had noticed she wasn’t around because her mail had been building up and had mentioned it to the landlord. The landlord had been trying to gain access to the flat to conduct a maintenance check, and in the end had let himself in. He’d found the place deserted, but looking as if Scott hadn’t expected to be away. There was food rotting in the fridge, a bottle of curdled milk left out in the kitchen, the bed left unmade. It was at that point he’d decided to report her absence to the police.

The police had checked through the mail, but, other than a couple of bills, it had been largely junk. The flat had been treated as a potential crime scene and examined thoroughly, but there were no clues as to where or why she might have gone. The landlord and neighbours had had little knowledge of Katy Scott’s family or friends, and—until the discovery of her body—it had not been possible to track down her next of kin. They’d found some payslips from a couple of local bars where she’d been working, but the owners and staff there knew little about her personal life. She was friendly enough, they said. Occasionally went out for a drink with the other girls, but no-one had got to know her very well. She’d just drifted into the place, rubbed along well enough, and then drifted out again. When she hadn’t turned up for work, nobody, including the bar managers, had thought much of it. It was that sort of job. People were here today and most likely gone tomorrow.

It struck McKay, as he read through the various documents, that there must be countless people out there living similarly isolated, rootless lives. Politicians banged on about hard-working families even while those traditional family structures dissolved around them. There was an army of young, and sometimes not so young, people moving from dead-end job to dead-end job with no family support and, in many cases, little in the way of real friendships. They held on, for the most part, made enough to survive, maybe even had an OK time. But if they fell off the grid, as Katy Scott seemed to have done, there was no-one to notice, let alone care.

Why were they there? Countless reasons, he supposed. He knew, or suspected, why Katy Scott had left home. It didn’t have to be that extreme. Often, it was just because of the constraints of living with parents, or simply a question of money. His own daughter, Lizzie, had moved out because—well, who knew? Neither he nor Chrissie had ever really understood, which was one of the reasons why the guilt continued to gnaw at them. But theirs was just one instance among many.

McKay finished going through the files, highlighting any contact names or addresses he spotted though there were only a handful not already on their lists. He dutifully handed over the details to members of the team, and left them to it.

Mid-afternoon, as he and Ginny Horton were mapping out their next steps, Helena Grant poked her head round the door. ‘Just finished the media conference,’ she said. ‘Bit of a scrum, so I cleared out as quickly as I could. Left the chief super to fend them off.’

‘How was it?’ McKay said.

‘Not so bad, really. We had quite a national contingent there. BBC, Sky, various dailies. It’s becoming a big story.’

‘Oh, joy,’ McKay commented sourly.

‘Ach, it was OK. Most of them just wanted me to use the phrase “serial killer” so they could stick in their headlines. Needless to say, I played a straight bat. “Treating the cases as possibly linked but not making any assumptions” stuff.’

‘How much have we released in terms of detail?’ Horton asked.

‘Just the bare bones. Two bodies. Treating them as murder. Nothing about the roses or candles. Nothing about the actual cause of death.’

‘Wonder how long before some of that gets out,’ McKay said. He jerked a thumb towards the wall, indicating the team working in the adjoining offices. ‘They seem a decent bunch, but some of them are unknown quantities. Wouldn’t be surprised if we get some leakage.’

Grant shrugged. ‘We’ll see. I put my trust in the innate goodness of my fellow man.’

‘Aye, me too. Right up until they land me in the shite. Speaking of which, did the media buggers try to throw any in our direction? Shite, I mean.’

‘They’re keeping their powder dry,’ Grant said. ‘With a case like this, it’s bad taste to start attacking the police too early. They’ll wait till we mess something up or look as if we’re getting nowhere.’

‘May not have long to wait, then,’ McKay said, gloomily. ‘We’re getting nowhere fast at the moment. Don’t even have an ID for the second victim yet.’

‘It’ll come.’ Grant exuded a confidence that McKay knew she didn’t feel. That was one reason she was so good with the troops. She led from the front, unlike some of those above her. ‘We gave the media a description of the second victim, including the tattoos. It’ll go out nationwide. Let’s hope that sparks something overnight.’

‘Aye, let’s hope,’ McKay said, in a voice that suggested that, for him at least, that particular quality was currently in very short supply.

***

Once she’d passed the entrance to the military camp at Fort George, Ginny Horton took one of the left-hand tracks down to the sea. She was into a good rhythm now, feet pounding on the hard surface, breathing steady and in control. She was at the point where she felt she could run forever, keep going until she reached the ends of the earth.

The weather had held up for another day, and it was a glorious evening, the setting sun throwing shadows across the landscape. The sky was clear and the waters of the firth, now visible ahead of her, a rich blue. On an evening like this, you could almost fool yourself into thinking you were living somewhere warmer, more tropical.

She reached the point where the track petered out into scrubland, and then slowed. In front of her, across the scrub, there was a rough sandy beach, deserted except for the crowds of gulls that descended periodically in search of food. As she reached the top of the beach, she came to a halt, catching her breath and fumbling for her water bottle. She was doing well. Every night, she’d manage to shave a little off her time. She had no real objective with this, other than to keep doing it. Pushing herself as far as she could go.

The view was spectacular. Across the firth, to her left, she could see the small village of Rosemarkie, with its clustering of pastel coloured houses and church tower rising above a pale strip of beach.

Caird’s Cave, where the second body had been discovered, was a short walk along the beach from Rosemarkie. She couldn’t clearly make it out from here, although she could discern the point where the cliffs rose above the woodland to the east of the village. She wondered now, as she had when they’d first seen the body, what had prompted the killer to leave it just there, laid out surrounded by the roses and candles. It was bound to be discovered there, sooner rather than later. The first body, buried under turf at the Clootie Well, could conceivably have lain undiscovered for much longer if the young couple hadn’t happened upon it. The roses would have lost their blossoms, and quite possibly no-one ventured far off the tracks into those woods for weeks or even months at a time. It was as if, the second time, the killer had chosen to increase the chances that the body would be found.

The received wisdom about multiple killers is that they want to get caught. That, with each killing, they take increasing risks or try to expose themselves. Horton remembered vaguely from her psychology training that this was seen as something of a myth—that the truth was, rather, that such killers simply became more confident with each successive murder. In this case, though, she wondered whether some message was being sent, consciously or not, by increasing the likelihood of the bodies being discovered. Could there be other bodies out there? Could the killer have struck previously, but made less effort to make the body conspicuous?

As she had previously when standing on this coastline, she thought back to the previous summer’s case. Lizzie Hamilton. It was not dissimilar to their current cases. She had been a similar age, just a little older. She was a woman largely without close friends or available family, drifting aimlessly and rootlessly through life. Like Katy Scott she had simply vanished one day, with no sign that she was expecting to go. Like Scott, too, she had been a local, born and brought up in this part of the world.