Where the Bodies are Buried (25 page)

‘And you think it’s connected to the work he was doing for me?’ Anne asked.

‘As his associates,’ Jasmine replied, ‘we’re pursuing various lines of inquiry, starting with examining all his current open
jobs. Most of those have been well documented at our end, but the reason we’ve had to trouble you is that unfortunately Jim
seems to have taken your case files with him.’

She recalled Anne’s anger on the phone earlier in the week and adopted a tone she hoped sounded both sincere and businesslike.

‘I appreciate that this might be difficult for you, or maybe just
tedious, but we need you to outline for us what it was you hired Jim to look into.’

Anne gave a broken sigh; large on the intake, like she was gearing up for an expression of extreme disdain, then after a short
pause, the more measured exhale of someone who was showing admirable and pragmatic restraint.

Neil didn’t seem to read it that way, though.

‘Why don’t I go over this with them?’ he suggested to her, in a way that was supposed to sound solicitous and considerate,
but which Jasmine could tell Anne only found annoying.

‘I’m fine,’ she insisted, a little tersely. Jasmine’s guess was that she was anything but, and Neil knew this, but nothing
he offered to do was going to help. ‘I’ll talk them through it. You go upstairs and get the, you know, dookit thingy. And
keep an eye on Megan, make sure she doesn’t have any reason to wander in here, okay?’

‘Sure,’ he said, almost grateful to have a task.

Jasmine expected Anne to sit down, but instead she leaned against a worktop, her arms folded.

‘If you’re planning to record this or write it down, start now, because I’m only doing it once.’

Jasmine felt a moment of the kind of panic she usually felt when she was out with Jim: of being underprepared and conspicuously
found out as a fraud. She didn’t have a Dictaphone or even a notepad.

Ingrams came to the rescue by placing his phone down on the table and briefly working the touch screen. Jasmine realised she
had a similar function on her own mobile, but stopped herself from duplicating his actions because she thought it would be
obvious to Anne that she was just copying him. She at least remembered to put her mobile to silent. Having set the office
phone to divert to hers, she didn’t want any ill-timed interruptions.

‘My parents were Stephen and Eilidh Ramsay,’ Anne began, her tone slow, deliberate, well rehearsed. ‘My dad was a statistician
for a chemicals company outside Milngavie and my mum was a primary school teacher. We lived in Bishopbriggs, or at least I
did from about nine months; before that my parents rented a flat in Partick. My mum was from Paisley and my dad from Kilsyth,
where his parents still lived.’

She sounded dispassionate, like she was talking about someone else’s family, or even someone else’s ancestors. Maybe she had
laid this out
a few times too many, or maybe this was her way of keeping her distance from the flames.

‘This time twenty-seven years ago, August 1983, I had just started school. I was four. It was a doubly exciting time for me,
because we had a new baby. My wee brother, Charlie, was four weeks old. It was … a Friday night.’

Jasmine picked up on the pause. It wasn’t something Anne had any trouble remembering; she was taking a moment to steady her
voice, check she wasn’t going to start breaking down when she went on.

‘I went to stay the night with my gran and granda, my dad’s parents. It was so my mum and dad could go out for their dinner,
get a wee bit of time together, because everything had been chaotic with the new baby and everything. Plus I always loved
going to my grandparents. I stayed there a lot, usually a Friday or Saturday so my mum and dad could get a night out and a
lie-in. I didn’t understand their end of it back then, but I sure can now.’

‘You’ve got two yourself?’ Jasmine asked, then for a terrible moment feared she was about to be told some tragedy concerning
the little boy in the pictures, who was nowhere to be seen.

‘Megan and Charlie.’

She said this latter with an awkward smile, the hint of a lump in her throat.

‘Megan’s four and Charlie’s three. He’s at nursery, and Megan’s just started at primary school. I had some time in lieu so
I’ve taken it this week so that I could help break her in. They’re only in until twelve for the first month. Neil’s sister
will be picking her up the next few weeks.’

‘What is it you do?’

‘I’m a solicitor. Harley and Pryde on Albion Street. Used to be in criminal but I moved to conveyancing a couple of years
back as it’s just less depressing. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.’

‘And your husband, is he a lawyer too?’

She gave a short, dismissive laugh. Jasmine wasn’t sure if she was ridiculing the idea of her husband as a lawyer or Jasmine
for suggesting it.

‘No, Neil’s an IT consultant.’

She said this as though it should explain a great deal. To Jasmine it certainly explained why he didn’t look comfortable in
a shirt and tie, but evidently it ought to cover many other shortcomings.

‘Anyway,’ Anne said, like she was frustrated to have been sidetracked, but only in the way that it was frustrating to have
a cold-caller on the phone when you’re halfway through cleaning a really rancid oven, ‘my brother Charlie went with my parents
that night because he was being breastfed. He was a very quiet baby, I recall. Just lay there asleep most of the time, which
was why they must have reckoned they could take him to a restaurant. Or a hotel, rather.’

‘They were staying the night at the hotel?’ Jasmine asked.

‘No. They just went to this hotel restaurant, the Campsieview Hotel outside Lennoxtown. They were going to have dinner and
go home to Bishopbriggs, then come and pick me up again on the Saturday morning.’

Anne’s mouth opened but she stayed silent for a second or two. She had to swallow before forming the words: ‘They never came
back.’

She spoke slowly and deliberately, like she was trying to remember a speech rather than voicing what was going through her
head right then.

‘My grandparents reported them missing later that day. According to the hotel, they left the restaurant about twenty-five
to eleven, with Charlie in his carrycot. My mum was breastfeeding, so she wasn’t having any alcohol, and she couldn’t drive
yet because she’d had a Caesarean four weeks previously, so my dad wasn’t drinking either.’

Jasmine couldn’t fathom the significance of them not drinking, but it was incanted like a prayer, so it had to mean something
to Anne personally.

‘They were seen one more time,’ she stated, and now her voice really was wavering. ‘Saturday morning, around eleven o’clock,
at Bothwell services on the M74 southbound. The witness came forward to the police once the story had broken in the local
media; something he hadn’t thought of as significant at the time. He’d seen two people matching my parents’ description putting
a carrycot into the back seat of a car. It stuck in his mind because he had offered to help and they’d been quite brusque
in their refusal. It was the last time anybody saw them.’

Anne opened her eyes wide, as though trying to clear them, the way you did when you had just about avoided tears.

‘And were the police satisfied that it was your parents this witness had seen?’ asked Ingrams. ‘Not just some couple with
a carrycot?’

She nodded resignedly, as though she had spent many years contemplating the ways in which this might have turned out not to
be the
case. ‘It was quite a distinctive car. The witness said it was a lime-green Audi 80. That’s what my dad drove. I don’t really
remember it, but it’s in some old photos, sitting in the drive. And they did used to have a bit of a palaver fitting the carrycot
in the back seat. It was in the days before proper babies’ car seats, and according to my gran, my mum insisted on jamming
it in sideways so that it was wedged lengthwise between the back seat and the passenger seat.’

‘What else did the police discover?’ Jasmine asked.

Anne took a breath, a smaller version of that same broken sigh. Anger, frustration, then self-discipline, keeping a lid on
it.

‘Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Nobody had seen them between Friday night and late Saturday morning. It was as though they packed
themselves into the car and drove off the planet, somewhere south of Hamilton. It became a big story in the papers for a few
weeks, although I was too young to really be aware. Certainly too young to understand why my parents would …’

At this, her words dried up, and Jasmine saw tears spilling down her cheeks. She felt intrusive and voyeuristic, as well as
achingly discomforted at the glimpse this offered her of her own future. If after a quarter of a century Anne still felt this
kind of pain, then it wasn’t going to get easier for Jasmine any time soon.

‘I’m sorry,’ Anne said, ripping a sheet of kitchen towel from a holder on the worktop and dabbing at her face.

Jasmine knew from harsh experience that there was nothing helpful or sensible to say at this point, and so said nothing, despite
the pressure she felt to fill the silence. Fortunately, Neil came in and filled it for them. He placed a black box file on
the table and went across to comfort his wife.

Anne waved him away with a hand before he could touch her. There was a rigidity to her body language, no room for misinterpretation.
Not in front of the detectives. If ever.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said to them. ‘Neil will have to take it from here. I’m going to take Megan and wander along
to pick up Charlie,’ she told him.

Neil nodded understandingly as she walked hurriedly from the room. He stood awkwardly for a moment, unsure where to put himself;
apologising
for himself. Then as though recovering a sense of purpose, he opened the box file and stood back, inviting them to look through
its contents.

It was full of newspaper clippings, some wrapped in clear cellophane mini-wallets, others pasted on to coarse paper like items
in a scrapbook.

Scrapbook didn’t seem an appropriate word, Jasmine thought. Scrapbooks were for nostalgia, for treasured memories. Perhaps
that was why Anne couldn’t bring herself to give a name to the box. It had mostly stayed closed, she surmised, as even the
oldest of the clippings were only slightly yellowed, the newsprint and pictures clear and not faded. It wasn’t a box Anne
took out and looked through, then: more a repository where these things were shut away, but nonetheless she had felt a compulsion
to preserve them.

‘As you can see,’ said Neil, ‘it was a big story for a few weeks. Anne’s grandparents collected this stuff obsessively; then
the obsession passed to Anne herself. The tabloids kept it bubbling for a while by entertaining every attention-seeking chancer
who happened to see someone with a carrycot and a green Audi. Sometimes I doubt they even worried about the make or colour
that much. Then it trickled its way down the news agenda until being consigned to history.’

Jasmine flipped through the box, handing pages to Ingrams as she discarded them. There were clippings dating from the nineties
and into the new century, sometimes small news stories and sometimes full-page features. She saw a double-page spread from
2003, folded up inside a cellophane wallet. It included a family photo of Anne with her parents, a tiny head shot of the baby
inset. Opposite these were computer-generated images of how all three might look now, the new technology being the angle on
which they had hung this two-page rehash of old news.

Above a sidebar was a shot of Anne playing in her garden only days before the disappearance, included because it showed the
brand new green Audi 80 sitting at the side of the house. Inset into this one was a recent head shot of William Bain, the
last person to see the Ramsays before they disappeared. There were a couple of quotes from him too, but understandably he
had no more to say in 2003 than twenty years before that. It had been a chance encounter whose significance was only realised
after the fact.

‘Every so often something emerges that allows the press to rake through it all again,’ said Neil. ‘In the early years, as
you can see, it would often be an alleged sighting, usually abroad. Somebody on holiday in Greece or wherever would see a
wee boy of roughly the right age
with a couple who might vaguely resemble Anne’s parents. Summer’s a quiet time for news, so they could fill a page or two
by recapping everything, turn it into a feature. They never think about the pain they’re causing.’

Ingrams pored over a couple of these ‘Ramsay disappearance revisited’ spreads, the same sparse facts rehearsed and the same
photos rerun, ten years but no substantial differences between the articles. The only thing that had changed was the witness’s
head shot, the guy looking older and greyer, his reluctant and rather bleak fifteen minutes of fame evidently delivered in
instalments over twenty-seven years.

The most recent piece was only a couple of weeks old, a half-page flashback feature from the
Daily Record,
hung on the news that a private investigator had been hired to look into the case. There were a few non-committal quotes
from Jim and even a couple from Neil, but nothing from Anne. None of the pieces had comments from Anne.

‘She’s been offered plenty of money over the years for an interview, but she’s not prepared to put herself through it. It
comes around nearly every year, same time. It was Jim’s idea to tell them about hiring him. He said they’d leave us alone
if they had a new angle, and he was right.’

‘What happened to Anne?’ Jasmine asked. ‘After the disappearance.’

‘She was brought up by her grandparents.’

‘Must have been difficult. A terrible thing to have to come to terms with so young.’

Neil gave a small nod but looked away. He thrust his hands into his pockets, seeming to physically withdraw and leave them
to the file, even though he remained exactly where he was.

Jasmine reached into her own pocket.

‘That’s my phone,’ she said to Ingrams. She stared at the screen, angling it so that Neil couldn’t see that it was blank.
Ingrams could, though, and looked at her quizzically. She held it to her ear and pretended to answer, quickly explaining to
nobody at all that she couldn’t talk right now and would get someone to call back.