‘If she’s local, there’s just a chance he’d have known her.’
‘True, although the beach walker, the guy who found her, he told us that he’s lived in Gullane for nearly thirty years and he didn’t recognise her.’
‘So what’s Stevie going to do?’
‘He’s got a techie working on a photograph of the body, trying to make her look as lifelike as he can. After the publicity, she might be reported missing overnight, but if not, then tomorrow his team will start knocking doors and showing it around. If we haven’t identified her by late afternoon, he’ll release it to the media and ask the TV stations to show it on the news.’
‘That’s horrible,’ Paula exclaimed. ‘A dead woman’s photo on telly!’
‘It won’t be the first time,’ McIlhenney told her.
‘Excuse me,’ Louise interrupted. ‘I guess I haven’t been taking enough interest in my husband’s work. Who is Stacey Gavin?’
The two detectives looked at each other for a second or two, until McGuire nodded, as if in signal.
McIlhenney leaned his head back; suddenly it was as if his eyes were fixed on something far away. ‘Stacey Gavin,’ he began. ‘At five minutes past ten on the morning of March the thirteenth, she’s lying on a quiet beach near South Queensferry, almost under the Forth railway bridge. She’s on her back, looking up at the sky. Her arms are by her sides, palms down. It’s a clear morning, but chilly, so she’s wearing an Afghan coat, over a sweater, and a long dress that’s spread out as though she arranged it that way when she lay down. She looks very peaceful, so peaceful that three people walk past her, before a fourth, a lady called Irene Chettle, says, “Good morning,” but gets no response.
‘Mrs Chettle thinks she’s rude, and carries on with her constitutional. On the way back, she hails her again: no answer again, but she’s a wee bit closer this time, and there’s something, some indefinable thing about Stacey’s stillness, that makes her stop and go over to her. She stands over her and says, “Hello, dear.” Even then she thinks she’s being ignored; she gets annoyed. “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,” she says. She’s decided that the girl’s what she still thinks of as a hippie, and that she’s playing some game. She’s going to leave her to it when the sun comes out and washes across her face.
‘Two things strike her: she’s very pale, and her pupils don’t react. She reaches down and touches her cheek. It’s cold, even allowing for the weather. She shakes her, but there’s no reaction. Finally Mrs Chettle, a recently retired civil servant who’s never seen a cadaver in her entire life, realises that she’s dead. She doesn’t carry a mobile, so she legs it back up to the town and goes into the Hawes Inn, where she asks the receptionist to call the police.’
He paused, took a sip of wine, and refilled his glass. ‘We attend, initially in the form of two uniforms from the Hopetoun Road office: they look at her and they think, “Junkie.” A doctor arrives, closely followed by two detective constables, and they all think the same thing. The doc declares that to be the probable cause.
‘To be fair that’s not unreasonable, because there’s nothing that screams “suspicious death”: there are no signs of a struggle, and she’s a strong-looking girl. So the alarm is not raised: death is pronounced and the wagon’s called to take her away to the morgue, off the Cowgate.
‘There’s nothing in her pockets to identify her, no purse, driving licence, no mobile, no nothing, but by sheer chance, the driver of the ambulance is a South Queensferry lass and recognises her as a girl she knew at school: Stacey Gavin, number thirteen Wallace Court, age twenty-three. Chippy Grade, the inspector from the local office, goes to the house, with the female uniform who attended the scene. It turns out that Stacey lives with her parents, and her mum’s at home. They break the news. Naturally the mother’s stunned, too stunned to cry, like the bereaved can be until they’ve actually seen the body.’
Neil broke off and looked into his glass, as if it was a window into his past. ‘People have an off switch, you know. There are things that . . . We react when we’re told, but inwardly we refuse to countenance them until we’ve seen the truth, and know that it’s real, that there isn’t any way to avoid it any longer. Believe me when I tell you that.’ He drew a deep breath, as Louise reached out and squeezed his hand.
‘So there’s Mrs Gavin,’ he continued, ‘staring at the wall, in her own corner of hell, and suddenly she says, “What about Rusty? Where’s poor Rusty?’ Inspector Grade, bless his wee silver epaulettes, thinks nothing of it. He assumes she’s talking about her husband. His name’s Russ and he’s an engineer with a local firm, they’ve discovered, and so the inspector leaves the constable with the mother, and goes to see him, to break the news and to take him to the mortuary for the formal identification.’
‘So who was Rusty?’ asked Paula.
‘Rusty was her dog, but I’ll get to him later. The dad’s shattered too, as you’d expect. On the way into the city, Grade asks him, as delicately as possible, he swore afterwards, about his daughter’s drug habit. Mr Gavin blows up at him, but Grade thinks it’s hysteria and calms him down. He makes the ID, and he’s taken home to his wife. The pathologists are busy that day: there’s been a multiple fatality on the city bypass. So the autopsy is set for ten next morning, Wednesday. But there’s a delay: it doesn’t begin until eleven fifteen, and that’s when it hits the fan. That’s when the hole in the back of her head is discovered, and that’s the first time we realise that we have a homicide on our hands, a full day and more after the discovery of the body.’
‘What happened next?’ Louise leaned across the table, her face serious but her eyes bright with interest.
‘The pathologist was working alone,’ Neil told her. ‘He stopped and called for a colleague as corroboration, and he phoned me. I called Stevie Steele and we sat in on the resumed examination: we were there when the bullet was recovered.’
‘Why DI Steele? I thought Chief Inspector Mackenzie was in charge of that area.’
‘The Bandit? No he’s still on sick leave.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘They’re calling it post-traumatic stress, after that big armed incident in St Andrews that we got drawn into. Within this room, he went on the piss in the wake of it, and it turned into a breakdown.’ He glanced at his friend. ‘That one there’s muttering about a pitch for early retirement on health grounds, but I’m not going along with that.’
‘You’re too soft,’ Mario grunted.
‘No,’ Neil retorted. ‘The opposite: I’m probably too bloody hard. I was there and I saw the same bodies and blood that Bandit did. You think I didn’t get the shakes after it? I got over them, that’s all, just like I did when my best friend got himself shot a few years back. And as I remember it, you weren’t all that fucking nonchalant, even after they’d patched you up.’
‘Point taken,’ said McGuire, quietly.
Louise brought the discussion back on track. ‘So Inspector Steele headed the murder investigation?’
‘Yes, reporting to me, but he was under a major disadvantage from the off, because he had no crime scene.’
‘Why not?’
‘More than twenty-four hours had gone by since the body was discovered. It was hopelessly compromised: any forensic evidence discovered there would have been absolutely useless in court. We didn’t even have a reliable time of death, because the autopsy had been delayed so long.
‘Steele began with the parents, looking to build up a list of Stacey’s acquaintances, since nine times out of ten the victim knows the killer, but before that he spoke to Chippy Grade, who mentioned the Rusty remark. As I said, he was her dog, a Westie. She walked him every morning; her mother said that sometimes she stayed away for two or three hours looking at the seascape and such, stopping to sketch on occasion, and so there was nothing unusual about her not returning. She’d gone out around eight that day, so that gave us a firmer idea of the time of death. Or rather deaths: we found the poor wee mutt Rusty a couple of days later, washed up in Granton, with its lead still attached to its collar. It had been shot and, yes, we had a vet do an autopsy, and the bullets matched, so that’s something else we’re going to do this bastard for when we run him to ground.’
‘Did Stevie make any progress?’ asked Paula.
‘He eliminated a lot of people. He and his officers created a pretty thorough model of Stacey’s life. She was a full-time artist: she graduated last year from the art college up in Lauriston, and worked out of a studio in her folks’ attic.’
‘Did she sell much?’
‘For a newcomer she was doing all right; she specialised in coastal views, not just scenery, though,
