Karen finished her second cup of coffee, ignoring the leap to conclusions. ‘At this moment, Mrs McConnochie, I don’t think anything. But when I can see things a bit more clearly, if I do need more information, then I promise, you’ll be the first person I’ll ask.’
Thirteen
‘Do you know your trouble, David?’ Cheryl Mackenzie challenged her husband. ‘In your eyes, everyone is always messing you about, or out to get you. You’ve always been like that, and I don’t believe you’ll ever change.’
‘What the fuck do you mean by that?’ he shouted, spinning round in his chair to glare at her, his chin jutting out in a gesture that signalled sheer aggression.
‘You know bloody well!’ she yelled back, then paused, for second thoughts. ‘But maybe you don’t. I was going to say, “Just listen to yourself,” but why would you do that when you never listen to anyone else?’
‘That’s a laugh,’ David Mackenzie snapped. ‘I’ve got no choice but to listen to you.’
‘In that case, I’ll carry on,’ she shot back. ‘You’ve been sitting there all day, pretending to watch the football, but really you’ve been brooding, quietly boiling away. I don’t know what the ACC said to you yesterday, but whatever it was you’ve been in a foul mood ever since. It makes me glad the kids are at my mother’s and not in your way. Well, do you know what? I’ve had enough of it.’
‘Enough of what!’
‘You!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve had enough of you and these bloody grudges you carry all the time. Even when we were through in Strathclyde, and your career was going well, you were the same. You could see slights where none existed, and you decided that your colleagues were jealous of you when they didn’t actually give a damn.’
‘You’re making this up,’ he said, scornfully.
‘Am I? Do you remember Willie Crichton, that DI you worked with in Paisley for a while? Of course you do,’ she went on, not waiting for a response. ‘You never forget an enemy. Remember that police charity night we went to in the Hilton Hotel? No, probably you don’t,’ she conceded, ‘because you got completely trousered at it. I was dancing with Willie at one point while you were leering down the tits of some young WPC, and he asked me, straight out, what he’d ever done to make you hate him. The really terrible thing was, I knew.’
‘I’m glad somebody does, for I don’t know what the fuck you’re on about.’
‘Oh no? Does that mean you’ve forgotten about the case you worked on where Willie was asked to give evidence for the Crown and you weren’t?’
‘Oh, that one,’ Mackenzie muttered, his face darkening even further.
‘Yes, that one. You went on about it for months, accusing him of brown-nosing McMinn, the chief superintendent, the deputy fiscal, and everyone up to the master of his Masonic bloody lodge.’
‘He did too,’ he growled.
‘Like hell he did. You weren’t called as a witness because you were off with man flu on the day when you were supposed to be interviewing the guy you’d arrested and Willie had to sit in for you.’
‘That’s bollocks.’
‘No, it’s the truth,’ Cheryl insisted. ‘I know it is because you were so angry about it, you even convinced me you’d been stitched up. I went to see Mr McMinn, and asked him why. He was very nice about it, when he might not have been. He sat me down and he explained what had happened. He even showed me the log of that investigation.’
Mackenzie stared at her wide-eyed. ‘You. .’ he gasped, ‘. . you did that? You fucking idiot!’ he screamed, suddenly. ‘I wondered why I was transferred to fucking Coatbridge out of the blue. Now I know.’
‘Yes, now you know,’ she snapped. ‘And you weren’t there long before everybody there was against you too. I was so happy when you met Bob Skinner, and he offered you a job in Edinburgh on his drugs squad. I thought that in a smaller force running your own section, you’d get over all that aggro inside you.
‘But you didn’t, no, not you. You were hardly here before you were complaining about that man Martin muscling in on one of your investigations. And that was nonsense too, because at the end of the day you got the collar and the glory that went with it.
‘But as usual, that wasn’t enough, so you took to the drink, big time. Skinner could have got rid of you then, but instead he gave you a second chance. . and a promotion not much later. But in your eyes he was doing you down as well, by keeping you out of CID.’
‘And he fucking was!’ he hissed.
‘Is that right? In that case you should be happy now that he’s gone, and the new regime have put you back in there, as number two in the whole department.
‘But are you? No chance; you’re back to moaning and bitching about your senior officers, after only a few weeks. You know what you are, David? You’re bloody paranoid, man. You need help.’
‘Well, I won’t fucking get it here, will I!’ he roared, leaping from his chair, and leaning over her, so close that she pressed herself backwards, away from him.
‘Is it too much to ask,’ he bellowed, ‘that you should be on my side, just this fucking once, when that fucking thick Paddy Eye-tie gorilla McGuire is trying to tell me how to do my fucking job, and threatening me with fucking Hawick if I don’t do it his way? Well? Is it?’
She tried to push him away. At first he resisted, but finally, just as she began to feel real fear, not for the first time in their marriage, he straightened up.
‘There has never been a time,’ she told him, very quietly, ‘when I have not been on your side. But you have to change or I will go to Chief Constable Steele and tell her I think you need psychiatric evaluation. I’m not going to sit and watch you destroy yourself, and me, and the children, David; I’m just not going to do it!’
As she looked at him she saw all the rigidity go out of his body, saw him relax, saw a strange smile spread across his face.
‘You’re absolutely right, Cheryl,’ he murmured. ‘You’re not.’
Fourteen
‘It’s confirmed?’ Sammy Pye said, in anticipation, with his mobile pressed against his ear.
‘Yes,’ Karen Neville told him. ‘My missing person’s become your homicide, and you’re the senior investigating officer, by order of Detective Superintendent Mackenzie,’
‘So he told me yesterday. There’s an about-face for you. I’d never heard someone grit his teeth over the phone, but I’ll swear he did. I wonder what came over him.’
‘Are you kidding? I think we could both come up with the right answer for that one. Dark curly hair, become a dad recently?’
Pye smiled. ‘Probably. Here, you don’t have a problem with me being SIO do you, Karen?’
‘Hell no. You inspector, me sergeant. Besides, this might turn out to be an overtime job and I’m not in a position to do much of that, as you know. It’s much better that you lead and I give you what help I can, with Jack McGurk’s approval, of course. He is my boss, after all.’
‘That’s fair enough; I’ll square anything I need from you with him. What do you know, that I need to?’
‘I was in the middle of typing up a summary when Forensic Services called to confirm that the blood in the flat came from Cramond Island woman, now known to be Isabella Spreckley or Watson.’
‘Hold on a minute,’ the DI said, his tone cautious. ‘Do we really know for sure that it’s her?’
‘One hundred per cent? We don’t, not without a familial DNA match, and we’ve got no way of getting one. However,’ she paused, and he could hear satisfaction in her voice, ‘I have rousted out her medical records from the NHS. They tell me that she had her appendix out when she was forty-two, and that she had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a condition that’s one-third less common in women than men. It was being monitored by the vascular department at the Royal Infirmary. The partial remains in the morgue tick both those boxes. Do you have any reasonable doubt left?’