to cultivate a scruffy image, then at least it should be well-groomed scruffy. That was pure Zrinka.’
‘Have you spoken to A-Frame this afternoon?’
Amy nodded, wiping a tear from a corner of her right eye. ‘He was the first person I called. He hadn’t heard. He was workin’ when I rang him. He’s still got a day job . . . just as well, now this has happened. He stacks shelves at Scotmid in Leith. He didn’t believe me at first, until I told him to tune in to the Radio Forth news at one. I’m meeting him tonight, him and Benjy . . . that’s the other lad in the band. We’re going to have a wake for Harry and Zrinka up in the Pear Tree. They’d a record deal, too. That’ll be well stuffed with Harry dead. He was the musician, you see, and the programmer. A-Frame does the drums, and Benjy does the keyboards, or so they say, but really they’re just machine operators.’
‘What’s Lionel’s surname?’ Singh asked.
‘Broad. Benjy’s is Malcolm; Benjamin Malcolm.’
‘Thanks,’ said Steele. ‘Did Zrinka ever mention a woman called Stacey Gavin?’
The girl squeezed her can even tighter as she nodded. ‘She was that other girl that got shot, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘She knew her,’ she told them, ‘and so did I. That makes it all even scarier, I suppose.
‘Up at the art college in Lauriston, the final-year students have a show, where you can buy their work. Zrinka took me up there last summer, on a Saturday, just to have a look. “Let’s suss out the potential competition,” was how she put it, but she was laughing when she said it. Stacey was there, showing quite a lot of her work. It was really, really good, as good as Zrinka’s. It’s funny, I never really knew anything about art until I met those two. Now I’m quite keen on it. Zrinka persuaded me that what I do is art as well, in its own way.
‘Stacey had sold just about all of her stuff when we got to her. In fact, yes, that was what happened, she sold her last piece when we were talking to her. A man bought it; he said it would do nicely for his daughter’s new flat when she moved in. He was a nice guy; middle-aged, but he looked tough as fuck. He and Stacey did the deal, he took the picture away, and she said that was her done. So we went to the Pear Tree for a pint.’
‘Did you see anything of her after that?’
‘Zrinka did, more than me. She let her sell stuff off her stall last summer, until she had her own sales system lined up.
‘The two of them fell out, though. I think it must have been over that bastard Dominic. Zrinka found out that Stacey was going out with him. She warned her that he was a no-user, and Stacey didn’t like it. They had this discussion one lunch-time, when the three of us were in Bert’s Bar, along from the salon. It started off about Dominic; it wasn’t an argument or anything, Zrinka just said she was worried for Stacey. Stacey told her that her problem was that she never trusted any men, and Zrinka replied, “No, and you of all people shouldn’t either.” Then she stopped, but Stacey asked her what she meant.’
‘What did she mean?’
‘I dunno. I had to go back to work then. But Stacey and Zrinka never seemed to see each other after that.’
‘Stacey and Dominic,’ asked the inspector, ‘do you know what happened there in the end?’
‘She binned him. Stacey still came into the salon after the thing in Bert’s, not very often, but every time she did I told Mervyn he should be paying me commission. The last time I saw her I asked her about him. She said that Zrinka had been right, and that she’d chucked him.’
Steele looked at Singh, eyebrows raised slightly.
‘What about Zrinka’s folks?’ the big Sikh asked. ‘She seemed to have cut herself off from them, from her father at any rate.’
‘No, you’re dead wrong there. Zrinka loved her dad. He understood when she said that she was moving up here to make her name as an artist, where she wouldn’t be connected with him, and where she could be sure that people were buying her stuff because it was good, not because of who she was. Officially she was independent of him and her mum, but she bought her flat, and he slipped her cash every so often: I’m not talking about the odd tenner either. It was funny: neither of them knew the other was helping her. It was supposed to be a secret, but she told me.’ Amy smiled. ‘And then there was her brother.’
Drazen?’
‘Yeah. He calls himself David, though, David Barnes. Now he does have a problem with his old man.’
‘You’ve met him?’
‘Yeah. He came up here to visit Zrinka once. He took the pair of us out to dinner at Cosmo’s, just along the road from her place. He was really nice, really, really nice.’ For the first time since the detectives had arrived at her Comely Bank studio flat, Amy’s face showed a touch of colour. ‘In fact . . .’ she continued, then stopped. ‘A-Frame doesn’t know about that. Anyway, he and I hadn’t been going out very long then.
‘Poor David.’ She sighed. ‘I think that Zrinka was the most important person in his world.’
Forty
If he had known that Gregor Broughton lived in Elie, Mario McGuire might have delegated the visit to a junior officer. The Fife coastal village held mixed memories for him; some years before, when he and Maggie Rose had both been junior CID officers, they had been on a stake-out there and had wound up sharing the last hotel room in town. Their lives had been conjoined from that time, as they drifted into an ill-judged and ultimately ill-fated marriage, which had ended in relatively harmonious divorce. Many times he had wondered what would have happened to them both if, that night, there had been one more room at the inn.
He had avoided the place since then, but by the time the late-duty man in the Crown Office had called him back with Broughton’s home address, there had been little or no option but to go himself. He had called Paula to tell her that he would be late; she had told him cheerfully that she was in the course of reorganising the kitchen, and that he could be as late as he liked.
The drive from the centre of Edinburgh took almost exactly an hour. As he drove down the broad avenue that led into Elie, his navigation system told him to turn right at the first junction. He followed its orders, noting, as he drove past it, that the big grey-stone hotel in which he and Maggie had got together had closed for business and had been converted into flats. ‘I wonder where the weary travellers lay their heads in Elie now,’ he mused aloud, ‘and randy young coppers get laid?’
Broughton’s house was a modern structure, half bungalow, half chalet, with a walled garden and a gate that led down to the beach. Forewarned of his visit, the fiscal greeted him warmly: he was pleased to have company, McGuire guessed, since Lady Broughton was on High Court business in Glasgow, and would be staying over.
‘Have you eaten, Mario?’ he asked.
‘No. I came as soon as I had everything put together, the picture, the latest witness statements and the press release.’
‘I thought not, so I’ve knocked us up some sandwiches. That okay?’
‘Sure, thanks. That’s much appreciated.’
Broughton led the way through to a garden conservatory: the sun was going down, but McGuire could still make out the grey sea, and the East Lothian coast beyond.
The two men made small talk as they ate, of rugby, restaurants, wives and partners. They left the business until they had finished. Once they were ready, the detective gave the prosecutor a run-down of the investigation, and of the steps that had led them to Dominic Padstow.
‘Is Steele confident about the Noone girl’s memory?’ he asked, as the chief superintendent finished. ‘It’s one thing being sure of yourself in a police interview, but I don’t have to tell you that if she turns out to be a key witness she’ll have to be more than that. The last thing we want is for her to become hesitant and evasive under defence cross-examination. ’
‘Stevie’s my best officer,’ McGuire told him, ‘although I won’t appreciate it if you pass that opinion on to anyone else. He’ll have given her a quiet grilling himself, with that very thought in mind; if he’s satisfied, so am I.’
‘And you’re satisfied, beyond any doubt, that Dominic Padstow is an alias?’
‘We’ve searched every likely database in the UK and we’ve come up with nothing. He doesn’t have a
