‘I like your certainty, Noele,’ ACC Becky Stallings said, as McClair paused for breath, ‘and thanks for the update, but actually that’s not why I’m calling you. I’ve just had a call from the governor of HMP Edinburgh, I guess because of Wright and Benjamin’s visit there last week. She phoned to tell me that Inez Davis, née McCullough, was found hanging in her cell this morning. She’s dead.’

  ‘Fucking hell!’ the DI whispered.

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself, Noele. Thing is, with her father dead, her stepmother, Mia McCullough, is listed as her next of kin. You’re not far from Black Shield Lodge, so I wonder if you’d go along and break the news.’

  ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she replied. ‘I won’t do that, not even if you make it an order. I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from smiling as I told her. Don’t ask me to explain why.’

  ‘No, of course,’ Stallings murmured, realising her mistake and contemplating the wrath of Mario McGuire.

  ‘Bob Skinner’s back in town,’ McClair suggested, wondering whether the ACC would take her seriously. ‘As we all know he and Mia go back a long way. Perhaps you could ask him.’

  ‘I think I’ll pass on that one too,’ she said, back-pedalling. ‘Perhaps DCI Haddock would be appropriate?’

  ‘Perhaps, ma’am, but I think you’ll find that Sauce doesn’t give a shit either. I suggest you send a couple of PCs, like you would to anyone who didn’t live on a fucking big estate.’

  ‘Don’t push it, DI McClair,’ Stallings warned.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ she murmured, wincing. ‘I’ll ask DS Wright to advise Mrs McCullough of the suicide. She didn’t have any issues with the deceased. Mia’s on air just now. You know she still does her daily slot on the radio station, yes? How’s the suicide being handled?’ she asked, continuing. ‘Is it being accepted as such, without investigation? Inez was of interest in my inquiry, even if it was peripheral. She passed herself off as Cheeky’s mother for thirty years, and now we find that she wasn’t.’

  ‘I’m ahead of you on that, Inspector,’ the ACC said. ‘Obviously, I’ve told DCI Haddock about the death, because of his family involvement. He said the same as you, that the Black Shield Lodge inquiry has an interest. He wanted to go to the prison himself, but I’ve told him . . . persuaded would be a better word . . . that whatever the DNA of the female skeleton tells us, Inez McCullough is named as the mother on his wife’s birth certificate. DS Singh’s on his way to the prison now. So are the crime-scene investigators. The governor thought that was unnecessary, but it’s my call. I asked him to leave the scene undisturbed until Singh and the CSIs get there. It’s probably an overreaction, given the suicide rates among female prisoners, but the DCC agrees it should be done.’

  ‘You told him?’

  ‘I thought it best, given Sauce’s involvement. I’m glad I did. He said he might go to the prison himself.’

  Eighty

  ‘We do our best,’ the assistant governor pleaded, her tone high and insistent, as if she was begging Tarvil Singh to believe her. ‘We really do, but if they’re determined they always find a way.’

  ‘Was she?’ a voice asked, from the corridor behind.

  She turned to see a man in police uniform, with formidable epaulettes of rank. His hair was grey-flecked black, with tight natural curls.

  ‘Mario McGuire, Deputy Chief Constable,’ he said. ‘Was she determined? In hindsight were there any hints that she might have been thinking about doing this?’

  ‘None that were reported to me,’ Ashleigh Irvine replied. ‘Obviously there’s going to be a full internal inquiry, but I’m sure that if there had been they’d have been picked up by the officers who work on the wing. I didn’t know Inez well, but enough to know that she was a,’ she paused looking for a description, ‘a strong-willed woman. That was me being nice,’ she added. ‘She was dour, she was only communicative when she wanted to be and even then she was never pleasant with it.’

  ‘Can you back off, please?’ The appeal came from a tall man in a crime-scene tunic. ‘We need a little more space.’

  ‘Sorry, Paul,’ McGuire murmured. Singh and the assistant edged away from the doorway, giving him a clear view into the cell. The body was still there, laid out on the bed, wearing a black bra, soiled pants and socks. Her eyes bulged and her face looked black; there was bruising on her neck, but he saw no ligature. ‘How did she do it?’

  ‘She used her sweatshirt,’ Paul Dorward replied. ‘These rooms are adapted so that there’s nothing to hang yourself from, but like the deputy said, where there’s a will . . . In this case, when the officer locked her in for the night, as he closed the door she must have slung a sleeve of the garment over it without him noticing. It was wedged tight enough to take her weight. If part of the sleeve was showing, nobody noticed it. When the door was opened this morning, she fell on the floor.’

  ‘Time?’ he asked.

  It was Singh who replied. ‘The prison medical officer said several hours. He certified the death. There’s no doubt, sir.’

  ‘No, I can see that,’ the DCC agreed. ‘Paul, is there a note in there?’

  ‘No, but there is a Samsung tablet. There could be something on that, but you’ll need to charge the battery to find out.’

  McGuire turned to the assistant governor. ‘What did she do in the time leading up to her death? Anything unusual?’

  ‘We had an author visit in the chapel yesterday. Inez was there. The speaker was the guy who writes the Daley books. Maybe that tipped her over the edge, who knows?’

  ‘No chance,’ Singh said. ‘I’ve read them. They’re pretty good.’

  Irvine displayed a shy fan smile. ‘He signed one for me.’

  ‘Apart from that,’ McGuire continued, brusquely, ‘what else happened involving Inez?’

  ‘There was the police visit, earlier on this week. Something to do with an ongoing investigation; that’s all we were told. We weren’t allowed to have an officer in the room during the interview, so I can’t tell you what was said.’

  ‘Understood, but how did Inez react afterwards? Did she say anything?’

  ‘Not to any of the staff,’ Irvine replied. ‘But the senior officer on duty did say to me at the shift change that he thought she was rattled. If that’s true then it was a first. When Inez’s father died last year, it was my job to break the news to her. I’ve had to deliver that sort of news to prisoners all through my career, and I can honestly say that nobody ever reacted the way that she did. She didn’t bat an eyelid. I won’t go so far as to say that she smiled, for Inez rarely did, but I got the impression that I wasn’t giving her bad news. She did say something odd though. She looked at me and whispered. I can’t swear to it, but it sounded as if she said, “It still won’t stop him.” I have no idea what she meant.’

  ‘Did Mr McCullough ever visit his daughter?’ Tarvil Singh asked.

  ‘Not once that I can remember,’ the assistant governor said. ‘Nor did anyone else. Inez was a very lonely woman. It was as if she had no family any longer, if she ever had one. Not even her own daughter visited her. You’d think she would have, would you not?’

  Eighty-One

  Noele McClair was still irked by the ACC’s suggestion that she deliver the Inez death message to Mia McCullough. She wondered whether there was a female equivalent of the Peter Principle, that eventually people are promoted to the level of their own incompetence, until she dredged the memory from a business studies lecture that it was named after the man who described it.

  As she checked her watch, contemplating the southbound traffic on the Queensferry crossing, she realised that she was irked in general. She was SIO on an inquiry that had begun as a mystery and developed into a double family homicide, made more complex by the presence of a third sibling at the crime scene and the shocking revelation that Sauce Haddock’s wife had lived for almost thirty years without knowing that her mother was buried beneath the wood that had been planted to honour her birth.

  There was a solution to be found, she was sure, but it remained elusive. A brother and sister murdered, and at least one of the bodies disposed of by a second brother. A family affair, as Wright had pointed out in jest, with two potential witnesses, but one was missing and she had been assured that morning by a consultant neurologist that the volume loss revealed by Moses Trott’s brain scan meant that his memory was gone. ‘Find Tony Hughes,’ she told herself, but even that was a shot in the dark. Hughes might have been an associate, but she could do no more than hope that he was the second son of whose existence Magdalena Smyth . . . ninety-year-old Magdalena Smyth, she reminded herself . . . had been so certain.

  But there was more. There had to be more, something close that was evading her, a question that she had not asked. ‘What’s the missing link?’ she murmured as her phone sounded.

  ‘Yes!’ she answered testily, without looking for caller ID.

  ‘DI McClair?’ a voice with Tyneside origins asked. ‘This is DS Cotter from the Glasgow team.’

  With an effort she pushed her frustration to one side. ‘Yes, John, it’s Noele. How can I help you? Or have you got something for me?’ she asked, hopefully.

  ‘It’s something I need to ask you, Noele,’ Cotter said. ‘You’re fully occupied with the Perthshire inquiry, I know, and I’m sorry to interrupt you.’

  ‘That’s okay, John,’ she assured him. ‘I could use a little distraction, what is it?’

  ‘It’s the Matthew Reid homicide, well, suspicious death really, until the Spanish lab analysis tells us what killed him. Both Edinburgh and Glasgow Serious Crimes are working on it. DCI Haddock and his people are interviewing neighbours in Gullane, hoping to find witnesses who might have seen something relevant at the time of his disappearance. We’ve been tasked with looking at Reid’s early life, about which nobody seems to know very much. I know you had a personal connection, so I’m wondering, would you be prepared to talk to me about him?’

  Of course, I would,’ she assured him. ‘I’m a police officer. One thing we know about his early life is that it was ten years more recent than we thought,’ she said, ‘since Matthew seems to have let all of us believe he was ten years older than his birth certificate said.’

  ‘Exactly. Why would he do that?’ Cotter asked. ‘His employment history in Great Britain goes back to the 1980s; DWP and HMRC have helped me establish that, and they did know his true age. From then on it’s easy to follow. A few years after he moved here, his first novel was published and that’s when the false biography started to appear. So did the published version of his life story. As an author he’s been interviewed many times, but in none of those features and articles does he ever talk about his early life. That’s what I’ve been investigating.’

  ‘Where has that taken you?’ McClair asked.

  ‘Ireland.’

  ‘Indeed? Where did that come from?’

  ‘From a lady-friend of his, Verona Lyon. Is the name familiar?’

  ‘As a TV presenter? Yes, I remember her. And yes,’ she admitted, ‘Matthew did mention her. In fact, he said she was the last woman he’d had sex with. You can add that to the murder book if you want.’ She laughed. ‘I know, John; you want to ask if I mean the last woman before me, but you’re not sure. I’ll let you off the hook; yes, that’s exactly what I meant.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Cotter said. ‘I’m finding that very few people, DCI Neville and Verona Lyon aside, really knew Matthew Reid. Anything you can tell me about him can only be helpful.’

  ‘I can tell you one thing. Matthew was a very nice man, and a very kind man. His intuition was excellent. He knew how vulnerable I was after the things that had happened in my life and he respected that absolutely. I slept with him because he made me feel safer than I ever had, with my ex-husband and especially with Griff Montell. I could tell that Griff was a dangerous man; that was part of the attraction. Matthew was the opposite; he made me feel cherished.’

  ‘Possibly you were more than that,’ Cotter murmured. ‘You should speak to Verona Lyon.’

  ‘If you say so, I will, if only to compare notes. You know, I shouldn’t be surprised that he was younger than he said. I saw him naked; his skin hadn’t lost any of its elasticity and his muscles were still well defined.’

  ‘You must have felt terrible when you heard his body had been found,’ the DS suggested.

  ‘What’s worse than terrible?’ she asked. ‘I can’t describe it. Terry, Griff, then him. I felt cursed; I still do. There’s a Damon Runyon short story called “Lonely Heart” about a woman whose partners wind up buried in the garden. I can’t remember her name but I feel like her sometimes. I actually feel guilty about Matthew, as if my history somehow rubbed off on him and infected him in a supernatural way.’ She hesitated, contemplating her feelings. ‘The really weird thing, John, is this: now that everything’s sunk in, I feel relieved. I’ve been sure for a while that Matthew was dead. I thought that he’d killed himself to avoid being confronted with his crimes. Now, with him being found the way he was, it means that he didn’t do the terrible things he was accused of. It’s awful that he was a victim, and yet it vindicates him.’

  ‘But what about his posthumous novel?’ Cotter asked. ‘Everybody thinks it’s based on the old people’s deaths in Gullane, although the publishers aren’t saying anything.’

  ‘They spoke to me,’ she revealed. ‘A lawyer friend of mine contacted them and warned that if there were any scenes that might be taken to refer to me, I’d be going to court. They told me that actually the book’s a first-person prequel set twenty years ago in Glasgow featuring his main character Septimus Armour. They held back publication while Matthew was under suspicion, but for no other reason than that. You can expect to see it soon, now that he’s a victim himself. It’ll be called Grievous Angel. Look out for it.’

  ‘I will,’ Cotter promised. ‘I like a good crime novel. Noele,’ he continued, ‘when you and Matthew were together, did he ever talk about his time in Ireland? Did he ever mention having been a teacher?’

  ‘No, but we did talk about our younger days. I told him that in my teens I was a prude most of the time. I didn’t lose my virginity, to a guy, until I was twenty, on holiday in the Canaries, and even then it was only to stop my pals from taking the piss all the time. I told Matthew about that; I admitted that I couldn’t remember the bloke’s name, only that he was Spanish.’

  ‘What did Matthew share?’

  ‘Nothing about Ireland that I remember,’ McClair said. ‘We probably talked more about me than him. He asked me if I’d ever questioned my sexuality . . .’ She paused. ‘You’re not recording this are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he promised.

  ‘Good. Nobody had ever asked me that before; hardly surprising, I suppose, and yet I found myself telling him that when I was fifteen and on a school trip, I slept with a butch girl from Sweden who was in the same hostel as us. I suppose I could say I lost my cherry then, but neither of us knew what to do so it didn’t really count. Matthew smiled when I told him that, and then he said . . . John,’ she exclaimed, ‘I had forgotten this until now . . . “None of us really know. My first time,” he said, “it was unexpected, and unexpectedly beautiful. In fact, it was so beautiful that I ran away from it for years.” We stopped talking for a while after that. God,’ she whispered, glad that he could not see her tears. The Widow Crumb!’ she called out, suddenly.

  ‘Who?’ The DS was startled.

  ‘The name of the woman in the Runyon story. She was called the Widow Crumb. John,’ she continued, ‘that’s all I can tell you. Handle it discreetly please. Is it of any use?’

  ‘It may well be, Noele,’ Cotter said, ‘if I can find the person Matthew was running away from.’

  He thanked her and ended the call, leaving her contemplating a lifetime of loss and regret, and wondering whether she should have stuck with the Swedish girl. Until she thought of her son, Harry, and a shaft of sunlight shone through the darkness.

  With it there came another breakthrough. ‘Tiggy,’ she called out to Benjamin, ‘where are we with finding out about Naomi Trott’s employment history?’

  Eighty-Two

  The woman was confident and assertive. As Skinner had expected she was also good on camera with none of the awkwardness that he had seen all too often in the days of lockdown and Zoom meetings. Her name was Roi Symonds and she was the chief Australia correspondent of the Intermedia group. Her hair was a sun-bleached light brown and he was sure he could see sand in it.

  ‘Mr Chairman.’ Her voice boomed from his computer speaker; he adjusted the volume. ‘I should really ask you for credentials,’ she exclaimed. ‘My top-level contact is Hector Sureda. I don’t know you from Adam.’

  ‘But you’re not going to do that, Ms Symonds,’ he countered, ‘because my face is on the group’s “About us” web page and that would make it an admission of sorts.’

  ‘That is absolutely true, Sir Robert. It would be fucking stupid, and that is not me.’

  ‘You had breakfast yet?’ he asked.

  She raised a mug into the camera’s line of vision. ‘Beach before breakfast,’ she replied. ‘I’m a Sydney girl and the waves are good. You? You having dinner?’

  ‘I ate with my kids a little while ago. Their mum’s working late, on an autopsy that has to be done tonight. As if the subject won’t still be dead tomorrow,’ he grumbled. ‘Roi, this thing I’m going to ask you, it falls under the heading of doing the boss a favour rather than a journalistic assignment. For now, that is. If it develops as it might, there may well be a news story in it, in Britain and in Australia. I want you to find someone that the Scottish police believe is dead.’

  ‘Boss,’ she laughed, ‘if they do and he isn’t, that’s a story right now.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Skinner conceded, smiling himself, ‘but it doesn’t get used without my okay.’

  ‘What if I decide it’s too good not to break?’