Candles and Roses (23 page)

Chrissie had given him no clues to her own feelings, but he suspected she was feeling much the same. Neither of them showed any inclination to discuss the session afterwards. They’d collected a carry-out curry on the way home and eaten it in silence while some implausible crime drama played out on TV. Then they’d gone to bed, exchanging nothing but the most functional of conversation. This morning McKay had left the house before Chrissie had been awake, telling himself he had work to do.

That much at least was undeniable. Progress on the case remained slow and painstaking, and—despite Helena Grant’s best efforts to fend them off—the powers-that-be were getting restless. The latest was apparently a barrage of unanswerable questions from one of the local MSPs. There would be more to come. McKay booted up his PC and began to work through his list of e-mails from the previous afternoon, trying to identify those that needed an immediate answer.

Just before eight Horton arrived, and they spent fifteen minutes catching up on what the team had fed back at the end of the previous day. In truth, there was precious little content. More telephone interviews with people who’d known or might have known Katy Scott or Joanne Cameron, most of them going nowhere. From the contacts made to date, neither seemed to have had any close friends, and their workmates and other acquaintances were able to offer few insights beyond what was already known. So far, the contacts mentioned in Katy Scott’s texts to her mother had proved either elusive or uninformative.

They were beginning to discuss Horton’s thoughts from the previous evening when McKay’s mobile buzzed on his desk. He glanced at the screen. A number he didn’t recognise.

‘DI McKay? This is Kelly Armstrong. From the Clootie Well.’

‘You’re the wee lass who found the body?’

‘That’s me,’ she said. ‘Well, Greg found the body.’

‘Aye, well. You both coped very well. Must have been a shock. What can I do for you?’

‘You said to call if we had anything else to tell you.’

McKay looked up at Horton, who was clearly following the dialogue. ‘Aye, and do you?’

There was a pause. ‘Well, not as such. And I’m not sure if you’re the right person to contact. But, well, something’s happened and I’m not sure if it’s significant.’

‘Go on.’

Kelly recounted her experience in the Caledonian Bar the previous day. ‘You see, I thought I’d better tell you because—’

‘Because Lizzie Hamilton worked there,’ McKay said.

‘Well, yes, but I didn’t think you’d—’

‘Make the connection. Aye, well, that case is still lingering like a bad smell around here. Tell me again what Gorman said to you.’

‘It wasn’t just yesterday. He’s come back to this two or three times while I was working there. He kept saying things like: “She just left” and “It was nothing to do with me”.’

‘You think he might be protesting too much?’

‘That’s the way it felt. It just seemed odd the way he kept coming back to it. Then yesterday when he tried—’

‘Aye, I understand, lass. We can follow that up anyway, assuming you want us to.’

‘What will it involve?’

‘We’ll take a statement from you. We’ll interview Gorman. We’ll consider whether to recommend further action.’

‘What’s likely to happen?’

‘To be honest, it’s going to be difficult to make anything stick. At the end of the day, it’ll be your word against his. I’m assuming there are no signs of any assault—no bruising or anything of that kind?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Like I say, he just grabbed my shoulders.’

‘Sounds like he’s the one who came off worst,’ McKay said. ‘So well done you. But he’ll probably just claim it was all a misunderstanding. That he hadn’t meant to harm or scare you. Blah, blah, blah.’

‘So what should I do?’

‘Up to you. If you make it formal, we can probably give him a caution which will at least sit on his record. At the very least, we can go up there and read him the riot act. It all reduces the chances he’ll do it again to some other woman.’

‘In that case, I’ll do it.’

‘Not for me to offer a view,’ McKay said, ‘but that’s the right answer. Anything we can do to discourage people like him the better. The question, though, is whether he’s anything more than a slimy sex pest. It sounds as if there might have been some history to his relationship with Hamilton we didn’t uncover at the time. I’d assumed he had the hots for her, but there was no evidence of anything beyond that. From what you’re saying, we need to have another word with him on that front as well.’

‘You don’t think I’m wasting your time, then?’

‘Christ, no,’ McKay said, with feeling. ‘There may be nothing in it. But if there is—well, we’d want to know. If you can come in and give us a statement, we’ll get things moving.’

They made the necessary arrangements, Kelly saying she’d come into town with Greg later than morning. McKay ended the call and looked at Horton, who’d been following the gist of the conversation.

‘What do you reckon?’ he said.

‘Well, it’ll be good to tell that slimy bastard to keep his hands off the bar staff,’ she said. ‘He gave me the creeps when I met him last year. As for the rest—I don’t know. He’s a lech, all right, but I’d have said he wasn’t anything more than that. Apart from anything else, he’d be too pissed to do much about it most of the time.’ She paused. ‘But if I overheard correctly, it does sound like there’s something there. That he knows something about Hamilton, maybe, which he didn’t bother to share with us.’

‘Aye, that’s the way it felt to me,’ McKay says. ‘Well, if he does know something, he’ll share it this time, right enough.’

She was watching him carefully, knowing the way McKay tended to think. ‘You think this has anything to do with our killings? Lizzie Hamilton, I mean.’

‘Christ knows. I can’t see how it would.’ He stopped, staring into space, as if his subconscious was making connections his brain hadn’t yet recognised. ‘But, then, like we’ve said before, it might be that she fits the pattern.’

***

Kelly had been to Divisional HQ, with Greg hanging protectively by her side, and given a characteristically clear and succinct statement. McKay felt as if for days he’d been hearing nothing but accounts of abuse, dysfunctional families, rootless drifters, loveless lives. It was refreshing to see two young people who so obviously cared for each other. Cynically, he wondered how long that was likely to last.

‘Time for us to go and have a word with Gorman,’ he said. He was conscious that interviewing Gorman wouldn’t necessarily be high on Helena Grant’s priority list. A couple of uniforms could have gone up there to deal with the accusation of assault. The Lizzie Hamilton case was, in theory, still open and on McKay’s books, but Grant would take some persuading that they should be paying much attention to it just at the moment. The solution, as ever, would be to seek her forgiveness afterwards rather than her permission in advance.

The weather hadn’t much improved, and McKay had the sense that the dreich downpour was set in for the rest of the summer. He didn’t envy those with holiday homes to let or hotel rooms to fill. As they drove over the Kessock Bridge, a bleak band of heavier rain swept in from the Firth forcing Horton to turn on her headlights. It was a mid-afternoon in early summer, but it felt as if the nights were already drawing in.

Horton pulled up on the double-yellows outside the Caledonian Bar, and stuck the official ‘Police’ sign under the windscreen, not that there was much likelihood of a ticket on a day like this.

Inside the bar was as deserted as ever. The lunchtime rush, such as it ever was, was over, and the elderly regulars had disappeared in pursuit of their afternoon naps. Gorman was at his familiar place at the bar, a half-empty pint and a whisky chaser next to him. He glanced up in surprise at their entrance.

McKay held out his warrant card. ‘You remember us, Mr Gorman. We met last year. DI McKay and DC Horton.’

Gorman blinked blearily at them. ‘Aye, I remember. What of it?’

‘We’d just like another word, Mr Gorman. About a couple of issues.’ McKay sat himself at one of the pub tables and kicked out a chair, gesturing Gorman to join him. Horton took the third seat and pulled out her notebook.

Gorman gazed at them for a moment and then slid unsteadily off his bar stool. Clutching a drink in each hand he stumbled over and sat down at the table.

‘Quiet afternoon?’ McKay peered round the empty room as if expecting to spot a hidden customer.

‘Aye, well. It’s the weather, isn’t it?’

‘I imagine so. Do you have a Kelly Armstrong working here?’

‘Not anymore.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She left.’

McKay exchanged a glance with Horton.
She just left.
‘Any particular reason?’

‘You’d have to ask her. She didn’t turn in today.’

‘Is that right, Mr Gorman? The thing is, as it happens, we have asked her. And she tells us the reason she hasn’t turned in today is because you assaulted her yesterday.’

Gorman half rose from his seat. ‘What’s that bloody bitch been—?’

McKay waved Gorman back into his seat. ‘Calm down, Mr Gorman. I’m not sure you’re safe on your feet. At the moment, we just want to ask you a few questions. What’s your version of what happened yesterday?’

The lengthy pause suggested that Gorman hadn’t given much thought to his version of events. ‘Christ, I don’t know. Lass was down in the cellar doing a stock take. I mean, for Christ’s sake, I’d offered her some fucking overtime—’

‘And what happened?’

‘It was just one of those things. A misunderstanding, I suppose.’

‘A misunderstanding?’

‘I was just going to talk to her. You know, discuss a few things—’

‘Advice on the finer points of stocktaking technique?’

‘No, I mean, it was just to have a chat. You know.’

‘Not really, Mr Gorman,’ McKay said, wearily. ‘Kelly Armstrong strikes me as a fairly clued-up young woman. I’m not sure how she’d mistake “having a chat” for an assault.’

‘It was just one of those things.’

‘What sort of things, Mr Gorman? What did you actually do?’

Gorman took a large swallow of his whisky. ‘I suppose I sort of grabbed her. You know, to get her attention.’

‘You don’t think a simple “excuse me” might have been sufficient?’

Gorman seemed drunkenly impervious to McKay’s irony. ‘Well, she was working. I wasn’t sure she’d heard—’

‘So you grabbed her? How did you grab her, Mr Gorman?’

‘Well, just by the shoulders. It was nothing—’

‘And then what did you do, Mr Gorman? To get her attention, I mean.’

‘I was a bit—you know.’ He gestured towards his whisky glass. ‘I probably wasn’t thinking straight. I held her against the wall, I suppose.’ He trailed off.

‘So you grabbed her, and you pushed her against the wall. In the cellar. Because you wanted to have a chat. Is this your standard conversational technique, Mr Gorman? You must be a wow at parties.’

‘Look, I didn’t mean—’

‘What was this chat about, Mr Gorman? What did you want to talk to Kelly Armstrong about exactly?’

Gorman looked as if he wanted, more than anything else in the world, to go over to the bar and top up his glass. McKay had the sense that, deprived of any more alcohol, the man might confess to literally anything. ‘Just—you know—stuff.’

‘Stuff?’ McKay spat out the word. ‘What sort of stuff would you want to talk to a young woman about, Mr Gorman? What sort of stuff might you have in common?’

Gorman swallowed the last of his whisky and said: ‘She’d been asking about the woman who used to work here. The one who went missing.’

‘Lizzie Hamilton?’

‘Aye. Lizzie Hamilton.’

‘Why was Kelly Armstrong interested in Lizzie Hamilton?’

‘You’d have to ask her that.’ Gorman stopped and laughed, mirthlessly. ‘Oh, don’t tell me. You already have. She’d reckoned she knew Lizzie. There was nothing I could tell her. Lizzie Hamilton just left.’

‘That right?’ McKay said. ‘The same way you reckoned Kelly Armstrong had just left when we first asked you? Did Lizzie Hamilton leave for the same reason?’

‘She just left,’ Gorman repeated. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ McKay said. ‘Kelly Armstrong left because you subjected her to a drunken assault in your cellar. Armstrong was feisty enough to fight back. Maybe Hamilton wasn’t.’

Gorman looked up sharply, his bloodshot eyes coming into focus. ‘What do you mean?’

‘What I mean, Mr Gorman, is that Lizzie Hamilton is still missing. No-one’s seen any sign of her since she supposedly walked out of your establishment nearly a year ago. She left food rotting in her fridge. She left bills unpaid. She’s not used her bank account since that day. And I wonder now if maybe you know something about that.’

The silence was much longer this time. Gorman sat staring into his empty whisky glass as if hoping it might magically refill. McKay was content to let the silence build, sensing there was something Gorman wanted to tell them.

Finally, Gorman said: ‘I don’t know. Maybe something.’

McKay made no immediate response, but pushed himself slowly to his feet, picked up Gorman’s glass, and took it behind the bar to top it up. He slid the filled glass across the table to Gorman. ‘Go on.’

Gorman took a grateful swallow of the spirit. ‘It was four or five days before she left. She sometimes used to stay behind a bit after hours and have a final drink or two with me and maybe a couple of the lads, depending who was in. Just company, you know. She liked a drink or two, did Lizzie.’ He took another mouthful. ‘Anyway, that night, she seemed to have one or two too many. Not like her—’

‘Who was in the bar that night? After hours, I mean. Who was drinking with you?’

‘A couple of the old guys at first. I can give you their names. But they peeled off about half-eleven. So me and Lizzie knocked back a few more.’

‘And she got drunk?’

‘Seemed to hit her suddenly. We’d moved on to the whisky, but she usually handled that OK. This time, she could barely sit up. Looked as if she was about to collapse at any moment. I said I’d walk her home but she didn’t even seem capable of that.’