‘There’s more, you know,’ the bereaved mother said. ‘It’s in Stacey’s studio, up in the attic. I plan to rotate them so that they’re all shown.’
‘Your husband told my boss that in time you might auction them for charity,’ Montell ventured.
‘Never!’ Mrs Gavin snapped: her close-cut, permed, blue-blonde hair seemed to bristle. ‘I will never allow one of my daughter’s paintings to leave this house, unless it’s rolled up in my coffin. She put a little bit of herself into each one: she’s alive, on these walls, and she’ll stay there.’
‘I understand,’ the detective murmured, hoping that he sounded sincere. In a way, he was. There was something about the desperate house that made him think of his sister, Spring, and of how he would react if anything ever happened to her. And then there was Alex Skinner. . not, of course, that he thought of her in the same way as Spring, but nonetheless he cared about her, maybe more than he wanted her to know.
And then he remembered that if he had not been on hand a few months before, something would have happened to Alex, something terminal. He shuddered at the thought.
‘About your daughter’s sketch pad, Mrs Gavin,’ he said, in an effort to banish the memory. ‘As I said when I phoned you, we didn’t find one among her effects, so we need to verify whether she took it with her that morning.’
‘Stacey had dozens of sketch pads,’ the mother replied. ‘They’re all up in the attic.’
‘Do you know which one she was using when. .’ he broke off for a second ‘. . two months ago?’
‘No, but I can easily ascertain that. Everything she did was dated, with a note of the location. Let me go and check.’ She turned and left the room.
‘The studio must be the holy of holies,’ Montell thought. ‘No one else allowed.’
He stood in the centre of the room, his eye resting in turn on each of the ten paintings shown there. He had never thought of himself as an art critic, but he knew that these were exceptional works. More than that, they reminded him of something: it gnawed at him, something he had seen, a link.
He was still contemplating when he heard the front door open, then close again.
‘I’m home, dear,’ Russ Gavin called out from the hall. ‘Lunch ready?’
‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ the young detective told him, as he stepped into the living room. ‘DC Montell, CID. Your wife’s checking something for me.’
‘Of course.’ The man looked up at him; he was of medium height, and although the detective knew from the investigation files that he was forty-nine, and a year older than his wife, his sandy hair and firm jaw-line made him look at least five years younger. ‘That’s not an Edinburgh accent,’ he remarked.
‘South African; I transferred over here last year.’
‘Ah, that explains it, then. What can we do for you, Mr Montell?’
‘I’m trying to establish whether Stacey had a sketch pad with her when she left the house. Your wife’s upstairs checking for me.’
‘No need. I can tell you that. We both left the house at the same time, she with Rusty, me heading for work. I kissed her goodbye. .’ He fell silent for a few seconds, covering the awkwardness by glancing at the portrait over the fireplace. ‘She had her pad with her. I remember, because it was awkward for her, stuffing it into the big pocket of that jacket of hers, while holding the dog’s lead. Why do you need to know this?’
‘Because we don’t have it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Maybe nothing. It could have fallen out of her pocket while she walked the dog, before she met the person who killed her. On the other hand, we might have screwed up.’ He shrugged. ‘To be honest, and I could get sent back to South Africa for saying this, we did. The officers who attended the scene jumped to the wrong conclusion, and the doctor who was there didn’t conduct a thorough enough examination. Maybe when they gathered Stacey’s possessions together the book was lying apart from the rest, and they missed it.’
‘Could it have simply blown away?’
Montell looked at the man, surprised. Instantly, he had begun to regret his impulsive remarks, fearing that they might be seized upon as the basis of a complaint to the chief constable, and yet the victim’s father was making nothing of it: indeed, he was holding out a straw for him to grasp. He was too honest to seize it. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘That’s not a possibility. If you recall, that morning was very stilclass="underline" there was no wind to speak of.’
Russ Gavin frowned. ‘Yes, now that I think about it, you’re right. But it’s two months ago. What made you so sure?’
‘I was on another inquiry that morning, in Granton. I remember looking at the river and noting that I’d never seen it so flat. There was barely a ripple on it.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Montell.’ Doreen Gavin’s voice came from the hall. ‘I can’t find it.’
‘It’s okay, dear,’ her husband called to her. ‘We’ve dealt with that.’
‘Oh! Good. In that case, since you’re back, I’d better get on with the lunch. Excuse me, Constable.’
‘To come back to my original question,’ Stacey’s father said. ‘Two months on and you’re looking for my daughter’s sketch pad. Why is it so important?’
Montell hesitated, until he had formed his reply in his mind. ‘You don’t have it, we don’t have it. It didn’t blow away; it might have been left on the beach, or dropped along the path. But there’s a possibility that the murderer might have taken it.’
‘As a trophy, you mean?’
‘It happens. If that’s part of his behaviour pattern, we need to know about it.’
‘It isn’t a coincidence, is it?’ said Gavin, quietly.
‘What, sir?’
‘The girl in East Lothian: I read about her in The Scotsman. You think it might be the same man.’
‘No, sir. We know it is. Same weapon, both cases: my inspector told me when he sent me to see you.’
‘So your investigation will be moving forward again. That’s wonderful.’ He stopped, then gasped. ‘Jesus Christ, what have I just said? Another girl’s been murdered, two more parents are facing the loss we have, and I’m pleased. What sort of a bloody man am I?’
‘A normal one, Mr Gavin, that’s all. What you said is true; we were stalled, and now maybe we’ll find some evidence that just wasn’t there in Stacey’s case. Don’t feel guilty: that won’t bring either of them back.’
Twelve
To Maggie Rose Steele, Mr Aldred Fine was a caricature, with his tall, cadaverous frame, his round spectacles, his pencil moustache and his slicked-back hair. But no run-of-the-mill caricature: she had spent weeks after their first meeting, early in her pregnancy, trying to work out which face from her past he called to mind.
It was halfway through their second and, up to that point, last consultation that she had realised that she was gazing at a double of Ron Mael, one half of the 1970s pop band Sparks. This had given her something of a start, since that visage, part scarecrow, part vampire, had scared the five-year-old Maggie witless, and sent her scurrying behind the sofa, every time he had appeared on Top of the Pops.
When she had told Stevie that evening, he had dredged from his encyclopedic knowledge of modern music the fact that the brothers were still out there, somewhere, little changed in the thirty years since their heyday. ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ she had chortled, ‘that I might have had the real Ron Mael looking up me this afternoon?’
‘I’d like to think not,’ he had replied, ‘but if there’s one thing we learn on the job, it’s that you never know.’
There was no laughter in her heart as she looked at her consultant, across the desk in his office in the Royal Infirmary, in Little France. It was said that the district had taken its name from the servants of Mary, Queen of Scots, located there on their mistress’s return to claim her crown; Edinburgh being Edinburgh, there was a rival school of thought.