Читать книгу The Distant Echo - Val McDermid, Val McDermid - Страница 11

Nothing in Alex’s twenty-one years had prepared him for a police interrogation in the middle of the night. TV cop shows and movies always made it look so regimented. But the very disorganization of the process was somehow more nerve-wracking than military precision would have been. The four of them had arrived at the police station in a flurry of chaos. They’d been hustled off the hill, bathed in the strobing blue lights of panda cars and ambulances, and nobody seemed to have any clear idea of what to do with them.

They’d stood under a streetlamp for what felt like a very long time, shivering under the frowning gaze of the constable Alex had summoned to the scene and one of his colleagues, a grizzled man in uniform with a scowl and a stoop. Neither officer spoke to the four young men, though their eyes never strayed from them.

Eventually, a harassed-looking man huddled into an overcoat that looked two sizes too big for him slithered over to them, his thin-soled shoes no match for the terrain. ‘Lawson, Mackenzie, take these boys down to the station, keep them apart when you get there. We’ll be down in a wee while to talk to them.’ Then he turned and stumbled back in the direction of their terrible discovery, now hidden behind canvas screens through which an eerie green light permeated, staining the snow.

The younger policeman gave his colleague a worried look. ‘How are we going to get them back?’

He shrugged. ‘You’ll have to squeeze them in your panda. I came up in the Sherpa van.’

‘Can we not take them back down in that? Then you could keep an eye on them while I’m driving.’

The older man shook his head, pursing his lips. ‘If you say so, Lawson.’ He gestured to the Laddies fi’ Kirkcaldy. ‘Come on, youse. Into the van. And no messing about, right?’ He herded them towards a police van, calling over his shoulder to Lawson, ‘You better get the keys off Tam Watt.’

Lawson set off up the slope, leaving them with Mackenzie. ‘I wouldnae like to be in your shoes when the CID get off that hill,’ he said conversationally as he climbed in behind them. Alex shivered, though not from the cold. It was slowly dawning on him that the police were regarding him and his companions as potential suspects rather than witnesses. They’d been given no opportunity to confer, to get their ducks in a row. The four of them exchanged uneasy looks. Even Weird had straightened out enough to realize this wasn’t some daft game.

When Mackenzie hustled them into the van, there had been a few seconds when they’d been left alone. Just sufficient time for Ziggy to mutter loud enough for their ears, ‘For fuck’s sake, don’t mention the Land Rover.’ Instant comprehension had filled their eyes.

‘Christ, aye,’ Weird said, head jerking back in terrified realization. Mondo chewed the skin round his thumbnail, saying nothing. Alex merely nodded.

The police station hadn’t felt any more composed than the crime scene. The desk sergeant complained bitterly when the two uniformed officers arrived with four bodies who were supposed to be prevented from communicating with each other. It turned out there were insufficient interview rooms to keep them separate. Weird and Mondo were taken to wait in unlocked cells, while Alex and Ziggy were left to their own devices in the station’s two interview rooms.

The room Alex found himself in was claustrophobically small. It was barely three paces square, as he established within minutes of being shut in to kick his heels. There were no windows, and the low ceiling with its greying polystyrene tiles made it all the more oppressive. It contained a chipped wooden table and four unmatching wooden chairs that looked exactly as uncomfortable as they felt. Alex tried them all in turn, finally settling for one that didn’t dig into his thighs as much as the others.

He wondered if he was allowed to smoke. Judging by the smell of the stale air, he wouldn’t have been the first. But he was a well-brought-up lad, and the absence of an ashtray gave him pause. He searched his pockets and found the screwed-up silver paper from a packet of Polo mints. Carefully, he spread it out, folding the edges up to form a rough tray. Then he took out his packet of Bensons and flipped the top open. Nine left. That should see him through, he thought.

Alex lit his cigarette and allowed himself to think about his position for the first time since they’d arrived at the police station. It was obvious, now he thought about it. They’d found a body. They had to be suspects. Everybody knew that the prime candidates for arrest in a murder investigation were either the ones who last saw the victim alive or the ones who found the body. Well, that was them on both counts.

He shook his head. The body. He was starting to think like them. This wasn’t just a body, it was Rosie. Somebody he knew, however slightly. He supposed that made it all the more suspicious. But he didn’t want to consider that now. He wanted that horror far from his mind. Whenever he closed his eyes, flashbacks to the hill played like a movie. Beautiful, sexy Rosie broken and bleeding on the snow. ‘Think about something else,’ he said aloud.

He wondered how the others would react to questioning. Weird was off his head, that was for sure. He’d had more than drink tonight. Alex had seen him with a joint in his hand earlier, but with Weird, there was no telling what else he might have indulged in. There had been tabs of acid floating around. Alex had refused it himself a couple of times. He didn’t mind dope but he preferred not to fry his brains. But Weird was definitely in the market for anything that would allegedly expand his consciousness. Alex fervently hoped that whatever he’d swallowed, inhaled or snorted, it would have worn off before it was his turn to be interviewed. Otherwise, Weird was likely to piss the cops off very badly indeed. And any fool knew that was a bad idea in the middle of a murder investigation.

Mondo would be another kettle of fish. This would freak him out in a totally different way. Mondo was, when you got right down to it, too sensitive for his own good. He’d always been the one picked on at school, called a jessie partly because of the way he looked and partly because he never fought back. His hair hung in tight ringlets round his pixie face, his big sapphire eyes always wide like a mouse keeking out from a divot. The lassies liked it, that was for sure. Alex had once overheard a pair of them giggling that Davey Kerr looked just like Marc Bolan. But in a school like Kirkcaldy High, what won you favour with the lassies could equally earn you a kicking in the cloakroom. If Mondo hadn’t had the other three to back him up, he’d have had a pretty thin time of it. To his credit, he knew that, and he repaid their services with interest. Alex knew he’d never have got through Higher French without Mondo’s help.

But Mondo would be on his own with the police. Nobody to hide behind. Alex could picture him now, head hung low, tossing the odd glance out from under his brows, picking at the skin round his thumbnail or flicking the lid of his Zippo open and shut. They’d get frustrated with him, think he had something to hide. The thing they’d never suss, not in a million years, was that the big secret with Mondo was that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, there was no secret. There was no mystery wrapped in an enigma. There was just a guy who liked Pink Floyd, fish suppers with lashings of vinegar, Tennent’s lager and getting laid. And who, bizarrely, spoke French like he’d learned it at his mother’s knee.

Except of course tonight there was a secret. And if anybody was going to blow it, it would be Mondo. Please God, let him not give up the Land Rover, Alex thought. At the very least, they’d all be landed with the charge of taking and driving away without the owner’s consent. At the very worst, the cops would realize one or all of them had the perfect means to transport a dying girl’s body to a quiet hillside.

Weird wouldn’t tell; he had most to lose. He’d been the one who’d turned up at the Lammas grinning from ear to ear, dangling Henry Cavendish’s key-ring from his finger like the winner at a wife-swapping party.

Alex wouldn’t tell, he knew that. Keeping secrets was one of the things he did best. If the price of avoiding suspicion was to keep his mouth shut, he had no doubts he could manage it.

Ziggy wouldn’t tell either. It was always safety first with Ziggy. After all, he was the one who had sneaked away from the party to move the Land Rover once he’d realized how off his head Weird was getting. He’d taken Alex to one side and said, ‘I’ve taken the keys out of Weird’s coat pocket. I’m going to shift the Land Rover, put it out of temptation’s way. He’s already been taking people for a spin round the block, it’s time to put a stop to it before he kills himself or somebody else.’ Alex had no idea how long he’d been gone, but when he’d returned, Ziggy had told him the Land Rover was safely stowed up behind one of the industrial units off the Largo Road. ‘We can go and pick it up in the morning,’ he’d said.

Alex had grinned. ‘Or we could just leave it there. A nice wee puzzle for Hooray Henry when he comes back next term.’

‘I don’t think so. As soon as he realized his precious wheels weren’t parked where he left them, he’d go to the police and drop us right in it. And our fingerprints are all over it.’

He’d been right, Alex thought. There was no love lost between the Laddies fi’ Kirkcaldy and the two Englishmen who shared their six-room campus house. There was no way Henry would see the funny side of Weird helping himself to the Land Rover. Henry didn’t see the funny side of much that his house-mates did. So, Ziggy wouldn’t tell. That was for sure.

But Mondo just might. Alex hoped Ziggy’s warning had penetrated Mondo’s self-absorption enough for him to think through the consequences. Telling the cops about Weird helping himself to someone else’s car wouldn’t get Mondo off the hook. It would only put all four of them firmly on it. Besides, he’d been driving it himself, taking that lassie home to Guardbridge. For once in your life, think it through, Mondo.

Now, if it was a thinker you wanted, Ziggy was your man. Behind the apparent openness, the easy charm and the quick intellect, there was a lot more going on than anyone knew. Alex had been pals with Ziggy for nine and a half years, and he felt as though he’d only scratched the surface. Ziggy was the one who would surprise you with an insight, knock you off balance with a question, make you look at something through fresh eyes because he’d twisted the world like a Rubik’s Cube and seen it differently. Alex knew one or two things about Ziggy that he felt pretty sure were still hidden from Mondo and Weird. That was because Ziggy had wanted him to know, and because Ziggy knew his secrets would always be safe with Alex.

He imagined how Ziggy would be with his interrogators. He’d seem relaxed, calm, at ease with himself. If anyone could persuade the cops that their involvement with the body on Hallow Hill was entirely innocent, it was Ziggy.

Detective Inspector Barney Maclennan threw his damp coat over the nearest chair in the CID office. It was about the size of a primary school classroom, bigger than they normally needed. St Andrews wasn’t high on Fife Constabulary’s list of crime hotspots, and that was reflected in their staffing levels. Maclennan was head of CID out at the edge of the empire not because he lacked ambition but because he was a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad, the sort of bolshie copper senior officers liked best at a distance. Normally, he chafed at the lack of anything interesting to keep him occupied, but that didn’t mean he welcomed the murder of a young lassie on his patch.

They’d got an ID right away. The pub Rosie Duff worked in was an occasional drop-in for some of the uniformed boys, and PC Jimmy Lawson, the first man at the locus, had recognized her immediately. Like most of the men at the scene, he’d looked shell-shocked and nauseous. Maclennan couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a murder on his patch that hadn’t been a straightforward domestic; these lads hadn’t seen enough to harden them to the sight they’d come upon on the snowy hilltop. Come to that, he’d only seen a couple of murder victims himself, and never anything quite as pathetic as the abused body of Rosie Duff.

According to the police surgeon, it looked like she’d been raped and stabbed in the lower abdomen. A single, vicious blow carving its lethal track upwards through her gut. And it had probably taken her quite a while to die. Just thinking about it made Maclennan want to lay hands on the man responsible and beat the crap out of him. At times like this, the law felt more like a hindrance than a help when it came to achieving justice.

Maclennan sighed and lit a cigarette. He sat down at his desk and made notes of what little information he’d learned so far. Rosemary Duff. Nineteen years old. Worked in the Lammas Bar. Lived in Strathkinness with her parents and two older brothers. The brothers worked in the paper mill out at Guardbridge, her father was a groundsman up at Craigtoun Park. Maclennan didn’t envy Detective Constable Iain Shaw and the WPC he’d sent up to the village to break the news. He’d have to talk to the family himself in due course, he knew that. But he was better employed trying to get this investigation moving. It wasn’t as if they were swarming with detectives who had a clue about running a major inquiry. If they were going to avoid being pushed out to the sidelines by the big boys from headquarters, Maclennan had to get the show on the road and make it look good.

He looked impatiently at his watch. He needed another CID man before he could start interviewing the four students who claimed they’d found the body. He’d told DC Allan Burnside to get back down to the station as soon as he could, but there was still no sign of him. Maclennan sighed. Goons and balloons, that was what he was stuck with out here.

He slipped his feet out of his damp shoes and swivelled round so he could rest them on the radiator. God, but it was a hell of a night to be starting a murder inquiry. The snow had turned the crime scene into a nightmare, masking evidence, making everything a hundred times more difficult. Who could tell which traces had been left by the killer, and which by the witnesses? That was assuming, of course, that those were separate entities. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Maclennan thought about his interview strategy.

All the received wisdom indicated he should speak first to the lad who’d actually found the body. Well-built lad, broad-shouldered, hard to see much of his face inside the big snorkel hood of the parka. Maclennan leaned back for his notebook. Alex Gilbey, that was the one. But he had a funny feeling about that one. It wasn’t that he’d been exactly shifty, more that he’d not met Maclennan’s eyes with the kind of piteous candour that most young lads in his shoes would have shown. And he certainly looked strong enough to carry Rosie’s dying body up the gentle slope of Hallow Hill. Maybe there was more going on here than met the eye. It wouldn’t be the first time a murderer had engineered the discovery of his victim’s body to include himself. No, he’d let young Mr Gilbey sweat a wee bit longer.

The desk sergeant had told him that the other interview room was occupied by the medical student with the Polish name. He was the one who had been adamant that Rosie had still been alive when they found her, claiming he’d done all he could to keep her that way. He’d seemed pretty cool in the circumstances, cooler than Maclennan would have managed. He thought he’d start there. Just as soon as Burnside showed his face.

The interview room that housed Ziggy was the double of Alex’s. Somehow, Ziggy managed to look comfortable in it. He slouched in his chair, half-leaning against the wall, his eyes fixed on the middle distance. He was so exhausted he could easily have fallen asleep, except that every time he closed his eyes, the image of Rosie’s body flared brilliant in his mind. No amount of theoretical medical study had prepared Ziggy for the brutal reality of a human being so wantonly destroyed. He just hadn’t known enough to be any use to Rosie when it mattered, and that galled him. He knew he should feel pity for the dead woman, but his frustration left no room for any other emotion. Not even fear.

But Ziggy was also smart enough to know he should be afraid. He had Rosie Duff’s blood all over his clothes, under his fingernails. Probably even in his hair; he remembered pushing his wet fringe out of his eyes as he’d desperately tried to see where the blood was coming from. That was innocent enough, if the police believed his story. But he was also the man without an alibi, thanks to Weird’s contrary notions of what constituted a bit of fun. He really couldn’t afford for the police to find the best possible vehicle for driving in a blizzard with his fingerprints all over it. Ziggy was usually so circumspect, but now his life could be blown apart by one careless word. It didn’t bear thinking about.

It was almost a relief when the door opened and two policemen walked in. He recognized the one who had told the uniforms to bring them to the station. Stripped of his overwhelming overcoat, he was a lean whippet of a man, his mousy hair a little longer than was fashionable. The stubbled cheeks revealed he had been rousted from bed in the middle of the night, though the neat white shirt and the smart suit looked as if they’d come straight from the dry cleaner’s hanger. He dropped into the chair opposite Ziggy and said, ‘I’m Detective Inspector Maclennan and this is Detective Constable Burnside. We need to have a wee chat about what happened tonight.’ He nodded towards Burnside. ‘My colleague will take notes and then we’ll prepare a statement for you to sign.’

Ziggy nodded. ‘That’s fine. Ask away.’ He straightened up in his seat. ‘I don’t suppose I could get a cup of tea?’

Maclennan turned to Burnside and nodded. Burnside rose and left the room. Maclennan leaned back in his chair and checked out his witness. Funny how the mod haircuts had come back into fashion. The dark-haired lad opposite him wouldn’t have looked out of place a dozen years earlier in the Small Faces. He didn’t look like a Pole to Maclennan’s way of thinking. He had the pale skin and red cheeks of a Fifer, though the brown eyes were a bit unusual with that colouring. Wide cheekbones gave his face a chiselled, exotic air. A bit like that Russian dancer, Rudolph Nearenough, or whatever his name was.

Burnside returned almost immediately. ‘It’s on its way,’ he said, sitting down and picking up his pen.

Maclennan placed his forearms on the table and locked his fingers together. ‘Personal details first.’ They ran through the preliminaries quickly, then the detective said, ‘A bad business. You must be feeling pretty shaken up.’

Ziggy began to feel as if he was trapped in the land of clichés. ‘You could say that.’

‘I want you to tell me in your own words what happened tonight.’

Ziggy cleared his throat. ‘We were walking back to Fife Park …’

Maclennan stopped him with a raised palm. ‘Back up a bit. Let’s have the whole evening, eh?’

Ziggy’s heart sank. He was hoping he might avoid mentioning their earlier visit to the Lammas Bar. ‘OK. The four of us, we live in the same unit in Fife Park so we usually eat together. Tonight, it was my turn to cook. We had egg and chips and beans and about nine o’clock we went down into the town. We were going to a party later on and we wanted to have a few pints first.’ He paused to make sure Burnside was getting it down.

‘Where did you go for your drinks?’

‘The Lammas Bar.’ The words hung in the air between them.

Maclennan showed no reaction, though he felt his pulse quicken. ‘Did you often drink there?’

‘Pretty regularly. The beer’s cheap and they don’t mind students, not like some of the places in town.’

‘So you’ll have seen Rosie Duff? The dead girl?’

Ziggy shrugged. ‘I didn’t really pay attention.’

‘What? A bonnie lassie like that, you didn’t notice her?’

‘It wasn’t her that served me when I went up for my round.’

‘But you must have spoken to her in the past?’

Ziggy took a deep breath. ‘Like I said, I never really paid attention. Chatting up barmaids isn’t my scene.’

‘Not good enough for you, eh?’ Maclennan said grimly.

‘I’m not a snob, Inspector. I come from a council house myself. I just don’t get my kicks playing macho man in the pub, OK? Yes, I knew who she was, but I’d never had a conversation with her that went beyond “Four pints of Tennent’s, please.”’

‘Did any of your friends take more of an interest in her?’

‘Not that I noticed.’ Ziggy’s nonchalance hid a sudden wariness at the line of questioning.

‘So, you had a few pints in the Lammas. What then?’

‘Like I said, we went on to a party. A third-year mathematician called Pete that Tom Mackie knows. He lives in St Andrews, in Learmonth Gardens. I don’t know what number. His parents were away and he threw a party. We got there about midnight and it was getting on for four o’clock when we left.’

‘Were you all together at the party?’

Ziggy snorted. ‘Have you ever been to a student party, Inspector? You know what it’s like. You walk through the door together, you get a beer, you drift apart. Then when you’ve had enough, you see who’s still standing and you gather them together and stagger off into the night. The good shepherd, that’s me.’ He gave an ironic smile.

‘So the four of you arrived together and the four of you left together, but you’ve no idea what the others were doing in between?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yeah.’

‘You couldn’t even swear that none of them left and came back later?’

If Maclennan had expected alarm from Ziggy, he was disappointed. Instead, he cocked his head to one side, thoughtful. ‘Probably not, no,’ he admitted. ‘I spent most of the time in the conservatory at the back of the house. Me and a couple of English guys. Sorry, I can’t remember their names. We were talking about music, politics, that sort of thing. It got quite heated when we got on to Scottish devolution, as you can imagine. I wandered through a few times for another beer, went through to the dining room to grab something to eat, but no, I wasn’t being my brothers’ keeper.’

‘Do you usually all end up going back together?’ Maclennan wasn’t quite sure where he was going with this, but it felt like the right question.

‘Depends if anybody’s got off with somebody.’

He was definitely on the defensive now, the policeman thought. ‘Does that happen often?’

‘Sometimes.’ Ziggy’s smile was a little strained. ‘Hey, we’re healthy, red-blooded young men, you know?’

‘But the four of you usually end up going home together? Very cosy.’

‘You know, Inspector, not all students are obsessed with sex. Some of us know how lucky we are to be here and we don’t want to screw it up.’

‘So you prefer each other’s company? Where I come from, people might think you were queer.’

Ziggy’s composure slipped momentarily. ‘So what? It’s not against the law.’

‘That depends on what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with,’ Maclennan said, any pretence of amiability gone.

‘Look, what has any of this got to do with the fact that we stumbled over the dying body of a young woman?’ Ziggy demanded, leaning forward. ‘What are you trying to suggest? We’re gay, therefore we raped a lassie and murdered her?’

‘Your words, not mine. It’s a well-known fact that some homosexuals hate women.’

Ziggy shook his head in disbelief. ‘Well known to whom? The prejudiced and ignorant? Look, just because Alex and Tom and Davey left the party with me doesn’t make them gay, right? They could give you a list of girls who could show you just how wrong you are.’

‘And what about you, Sigmund? Could you do the same thing?’

Ziggy held himself rigid, willing his body not to betray him. There was a world of difference the size of Scotland between legal and comprehended. He’d arrived at a place where the truth was not going to be his friend. ‘Can we get back on track here, Inspector? I left the party about four o’clock with my three friends. We walked down Learmonth Place, turned left up the Canongate then went down Trinity Place. Hallow Hill is a short cut back to Fife Park …’

‘Did you see anyone else as you walked down towards the hill?’ Maclennan interrupted.

‘No. But the visibility wasn’t great because of the snow. Anyway, we were walking along the footpath at the bottom of the hill and Alex started running up the hill. I don’t know why, I was ahead of him and I didn’t see what set him off. When he got to the top, he tripped and fell into the hollow. The next thing I knew was he was shouting to us to come up, that there was a young woman bleeding.’ Ziggy closed his eyes, but opened them hastily as the dead girl rose before him again. ‘We climbed up and we found Rosie lying in the snow. I felt her carotid pulse. It was very faint, but it was still there. She seemed to be bleeding from a wound to the abdomen. Quite a large slit, it felt like. Maybe three or four inches long. I told Alex to go and get help. To call the police. We covered her with our coats and I tried to put pressure on the wound. But it was too late. Too much internal damage. Too much blood loss. She died within a couple of minutes.’ He gave a long exhalation. ‘There was nothing I could do.’

Even Maclennan was momentarily silenced by the intensity of Ziggy’s words. He glanced at Burnside, who was scribbling furiously. ‘Why did you ask Alex Gilbey to go for help?’

‘Because Alex was more sober than Tom. And Davey tends to go to pieces in a crisis.’

It made perfect sense. Almost too perfect. Maclennan pushed his chair back. ‘One of my officers will take you home now, Mr Malkiewicz. We’ll want the clothes you’re wearing, for forensic analysis. And your fingerprints, for the purposes of elimination. And we’ll be wanting to talk to you again.’ There were things Maclennan wanted to know about Sigmund Malkiewicz. But they could wait. His feeling of unease about these four young men was growing stronger by the minute. He wanted to start pushing. And he had a feeling that the one who went to pieces in a crisis might just be the one to cave in.