Out of Bounds (21 page)

There was a silence while her words sank in. Then Ash shook his head. ‘That’s mad. People like them don’t get blown up. Not deliberately, anyway.’

‘But I need to be able to rule that out. Tell me about them, Jack.’ Move into the more intimate form of address, make him feel loved. ‘How did you come to know them?’

‘I met Ellie first. She was the BA – broadcasting assistant – on my Radio One show for a while in the late seventies. We hit it off right away. She was a cut above most BAs. She
figured out what we needed and sorted it out before I even asked her. She never made a fuss or moaned about having to go the extra mile, she just got on with things. We liked the same music, so I sometimes brought her along to gigs with me. Back then, people like me had to hide the truth about ourselves, and Ellie was the perfect beard.’

‘Did she know she was a beard? Or did she think there was more going on between you?’

Ash gave her a scathing look. ‘Of course she knew I wasn’t interested in her that way. But she liked being seen with me. It gave her kudos. People noticed her. She had all the benefits of being my girlfriend without actually having to do anything except have fun.’

‘And she didn’t want a proper boyfriend?’

He raised one eyebrow in a practised gesture. ‘The main thing Ellie wanted was to be a star. She always said her career came first. She didn’t want to waste her time on romance when she could be networking. She’d been working for my show for less than a year when she got her first TV job.’

‘That was on
All Aboard!
?’

He shook his head. ‘
All Aboard!
came later. She started out on
TeaThyme
. It was a cookery show for kids. Ellie wasn’t one of the main presenters, she was more of a kitchen porter. But she had on-screen charisma. The camera loved her. And she buttered up everybody whose path she ever crossed in kids’ TV, so when they were looking for someone to present
All Aboard!
, she was front and centre in everybody’s eyes.’

‘You must have been pleased for her.’

His smile was as false as any she’d ever seen. ‘It’s always lovely when your friends get what they want. Of course, the downside was that she didn’t have as much time to come out and play.’ He sighed. ‘And then she met Caro and she started playing happy families. The woman who had never shown any interest in kids suddenly started babysitting
Will in the evenings when Caro was working instead of having fun.’

Karen’s antennae twitched. ‘What? She moved in with Caro and Will?’

Ash tittered. ‘Oh no, she didn’t move in. What happened was they bought a house together and split it into two flats. Caro and Will – and Tom when he was home – lived on the two lower floors and Ellie had the top floor and the attic. It suited everybody, apparently. Except Ellie’s friends. We saw much less of her after the move. Apart from Sundays, when Caro used to throw long lavish lunch parties for the theatre crowd. Actors, singers, scriptwriters. But it wasn’t the same. I missed that old intimacy with Ellie. For a long time I’d been able to count on her in a way I couldn’t any more.’

‘But you did get to know Caro too?’

‘Oh yes, I loved Caro. She was much more showbizzy than Ellie. And she was a fabulous hostess. Always wonderful food and endless drink and the most entertaining company. Those were wonderful Sundays. I met some lovely men …’ His voice trailed off, the distant look of reminiscence in his gaze.

There was a key player missing in all of this. A key player who might have had a motive for removing Caroline Abbott from his world. ‘What did Tom Abbott make of it all?’ Karen asked.

That quick flick of the single eyebrow again. ‘Tom was hardly ever around. He was a marine engineer and he spent months on end at sea. When he was home, the parties stopped and nobody saw much of Caro.’ He smiled. ‘But at least I used to get Ellie back for a couple of weeks before Tom took off again. But latterly, he was hardly ever around. He can’t have seen Gabriel more than a couple of times before he died.’

‘He died?’ Karen wasn’t about to reveal that this wasn’t
news to her. She wanted to draw from him whatever he knew that hadn’t been in the clippings.

‘Yes. It was out in Thailand, or the Philippines or somewhere like that. It must have been round about 1990.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘I think so. You can check easily enough – I remember Ellie phoning me to tell me, and I was watching Nelson Mandela being released from prison on TV at the time.’

Karen already knew he was right about the year but she feigned uncertainty. ‘I will check it out. What did he die of?’

‘Who knows? Caro said he’d contracted some sort of fever. I did wonder, though, whether she’d made it up to cover the fact that he’d left her.’

‘That seems a bit extreme. A marriage ending is nothing to be ashamed of.’

His expression was pained. ‘I know, what can I say? I feel a teeny bit ashamed of myself now.’

‘What about Caro and Ellie’s relationship? What can you tell me about that?’

The shutters came down. Apparently not everything was writ large across Ash’s face. He’d learned early on to guard the secret of his own sexuality. It seemed that singular discretion might stretch to others. ‘Are you suggesting they were a couple?’

‘I’m asking.’ Karen kept a level gaze on his narrowed eyes.

He sighed. ‘Just because I’m gay, I don’t assume the whole world is. It’s entirely possible for two people to have an intimate friendship without being lovers. After all, that’s how I would have characterised my relationship with Ellie. We confided in each other about many things, but not everything.’

‘I have one or two friends like that myself.’ It wasn’t quite a lie, Karen thought. ‘But you never asked? You were never told?’

‘I
never asked,’ he said firmly. ‘We live in a very gossipy world, my dear. If you don’t know, you can’t betray.’

He had a point but she thought he was bullshitting. Whatever there was to know, he knew it. But he wasn’t going to give it up. He looked at his watch and seemed to gather himself together. He was going to make a break for it. ‘One thing before you go. Did Ellie or Caro have any enemies? Anybody who might have wished them ill?’

His eyes widened. ‘We all have enemies in this business. But not the kind that kill you.’ He sounded affronted. ‘And if they had, I’m not the one they would have told.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Come on, Detective, you’re a woman. You know how you ladies share things you’d never dream of talking to a man about, even a gay man. There would be times when I’d walk into a bar where I was meeting the girls and they’d have their heads together with somebody from the theatre – Felicity Frye, or another one of the faces from gossip central – and as soon as I reached the table they’d sit back and pretend they were talking about shoes or handbags. I told you, we were close, but we were frivolous too. People were dying all around us. We didn’t want to spend all our time lost in grim reality. When I was with Caro and Ellie, it was about preserving what gaiety we could muster. But those girls were delightful, believe me. It’s unimaginable to think anyone would want to kill them. Unimaginable.’

27

U
nimaginable
was a word Karen didn’t acknowledge. As far as human behaviour was concerned, nothing was beyond imagination. What was harder to get used to was the number of things people did to each other that had never occurred to her to imagine. Sadly, what had been done to the four people who had boarded that Cessna Skylane on that May morning was horrible, but it wasn’t remarkable.

She’d hoped that Jack Ash would have given her something more tangible to chase. But he’d closed down on her as soon as she’d approached the serious business of motive. She’d given him her card as he’d stood up to leave, but he’d tossed it back on to the table in front of her. ‘I’ve told you everything I can,’ he’d said, his jaw set tight around his words. ‘There’s no reason for us to talk again.’

Karen had paid the bill, trying not to flinch. It was almost as much as dinner the night before, beers included. This private enterprise was an expensive business. She walked back out into the sunshine, glad to be out of Jack Ash’s self-absorbed ambit. As she walked back towards Regent’s Park, she considered what little she had learned. The most
significant fact was that Caroline Abbott had told the world that her husband was dead in 1990. Taken at face value, that meant he couldn’t have killed her. But there was always the possibility that she had lied. He might still have been alive in 1994 and enraged to discover she had killed him off four years before. Far-fetched, Karen knew, but she’d fetched things from farther away before.

There was one thing that Jack Ash had let slip. He’d been in full flood on the subject of women and their exclusive conversations and he’d mentioned a name. Felicity Frye. Karen had recognised it, and not just because Felicity Frye was a popular actress with a long and lively career in film, TV and theatre. She specialised in the kind of roles where seriousness is leavened by a sprightly wit. She’d been part of Karen’s viewing landscape since childhood when she’d starred in one of those perennial sitcoms that was always being rerun on some digital channel.

But there was another reason why Felicity Frye’s name resonated with Karen. A few weeks before, the actress’s face and her rich contralto had been all over the media when she’d revealed she had inoperable terminal pancreatic cancer. She’d spoken of the few months at most she had left and revealed she intended to abandon public life and hoped to finish writing the memoir she’d been working on for some time. Felicity Frye was a woman with nothing left to lose. She might be the key that unlocked the lives of Caroline Abbott and Ellie MacKinnon.

Karen walked into the park and kept going till she found an empty bench in a secluded spot. What she needed right now was for Tamsin Martineau to be the duty digital forensics officer in the Police Scotland labs at Gartcosh. When it came to navigating the undercurrents of the digital world, there was nobody better. And Karen knew that the maverick Australian liked nothing better than a challenge. You only
had to look at her platinum spiked hair and her nose stud to know she wasn’t going to be unduly bothered about sticking to the rules.

Karen speed-dialled the number and crossed her fingers. The gods were on her side for once; the phone was answered on the third ring and the accent provided unmistakable ID. ‘Digital forensics here,’ Tamsin said.

‘Tamsin? It’s DCI Pirie from the HCU.’

‘How’re you doing, Karen? We’ve not seen you round here in a while.’

‘I’ve been hiding. You still claiming the weekends and night shifts?’

‘You bet. I get more time off that way. So, what can I do for you? You don’t usually have stuff that’s urgent enough to need weekend working.’

‘It’s so straightforward I’m almost embarrassed to ask you. It’s just that I’m down in London on inquiries and I’ve got a lead on a new witness. I thought I might as well chase it down while I’m here.’ Shut up, she told herself. Tamsin’s a techie, you don’t have to explain yourself to her, that’s the opposite of casual.

‘Fire away. I’m ploughing through a routine batch of confiscated paedo hard drives. It’ll be nice to have a break from fucking with other people’s encryption.’

‘Thanks. I need an address and a phone number for Felicity Frye. The actress.’

‘Yeah, I know who Felicity Frye is. I may be a geek but I’ve not been living under a stone. No worries, Karen. I’ll get on to it right away. Call you back on this number, yeah?’

‘Thanks.’ Karen ended the call. Chances were she wasn’t going to make it back to Edinburgh tonight. Time to go and find a cheap hotel. Aye, right. A cheap hotel in central London. As if.

*

Jeremy
Frye accepted the bouquet from the florist’s driver with his customary friendliness. They were almost becoming friends, him and the delivery woman. Pretty much every day she turned up with another floral offering from friends and fans who couldn’t think of another way to express their sorrow and sympathy. Patrizia, their daily help, was developing new skills in flower arrangement. She’d become adept at plucking out the blooms that were on their last legs and distributing the remainder among the other displays. Just as well Felicity loved flowers, for these days there were loaded vases in every room.

Jeremy was less delighted. He found them too potent a token of funerals. They were a constant reminder of the event that was hurtling towards him. One day soon, far sooner than he had ever dreamed, he would be adrift in a sea of funeral flowers. She was only sixty-four, for God’s sake. These days, that was no age. They had friends still hale and hearty in their eighties. Friends who had lived rackety, dangerous lives filled with booze and cigarettes and drugs and red meat and fast cars yet were still going strong. And his beloved Felicity, the love of his life, the mother of their children, who had shepherded her health with good food and fresh air and exercise, had been struck down with this horrible disease. Not for the first time, he felt a spurt of rage burn through him.

Rather than show it, he called out lightly. ‘Florist, darling. Carnations and irises. From the Buchans.’

‘How lovely,’ came the reply from the garden room, the warm chocolate and caramel tones undiminished by illness. ‘Are they lovely?’

Jeremy chuckled. ‘Six out of ten, I’d say.’ He continued to the kitchen, where he was making coffee for himself and a vile herbal brew for his wife when the doorbell rang. He dumped the flowers in the sink, added water then carried the
drinks through on a bamboo tray with a plate of Felicity’s favourite spiced oat biscuits. ‘Here we are,’ he said, putting the tray on the table next to her, minimising the effort she had to make.

Felicity pushed herself more upright, and Jeremy was there, plumping cushions at her back. He’d always been solicitous. Uxorious, his sister always teased. Nothing was too much trouble now. He knew there would be years to come when he’d ache for the chance to do something, anything for Felicity. He watched her now like a hawk, alert for any sign of pain or discomfort. She had drugs, carefully calibrated to spare her, but she was reluctant sometimes to take them. And so he studied every lineament and movement of her face, not least because he wanted to commit her beauty absolutely to his memory.