The Impossible Dead

‘Would I be right in thinking the three of you just paid Teresa Collins a visit?’

  Fox rose to his feet. ‘She’s made a complaint?’ he guessed.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. They found your name on a business card on her chair – when they went in with the stretcher.’

  She saw immediately the effect her words had had, and kept quiet for a moment, the better to savour the discomfort on the three faces.

  ‘A passer-by saw her at her window, smearing blood on it from her wrists. He called the paramedics.’

  All three men were standing now, eyes on Pitkethly. Kaye was the first to speak.

  ‘Is she …?’

  ‘She’s in hospital. Wounds don’t look too bad. Question is: what drove her to it? From the look of you, I’d say I’ve got my answer.’

  ‘She was hysterical,’ Naysmith blurted out. ‘We left her to it …’

  ‘Having calmed her down first, obviously,’ Pitkethly said, twisting the knife. ‘I mean, this is a woman who’s had a traumatic experience. Fragile enough to begin with, and with a history of drug use. I’m assuming you didn’t just walk away?’

  ‘We don’t answer to you,’ Fox stated, regaining a little of his composure.

  ‘You might have to, though.’

  ‘We’ll make our report.’

  ‘And will there be conferring beforehand?’ This question came from DCI Peter Laird, who had just arrived at Pitkethly’s shoulder. Fox sensed that there were other spectators in the corridor. He pushed past Pitkethly and saw that he was right. Laird wasn’t bothering to suppress his pleasure at this turn of events.

  ‘I mean,’ Laird went on, folding his arms, ‘you’ll want to make sure you’ve got your stories straight.’

  ‘She’s going to be all right, though?’ Joe Naysmith was asking Pitkethly.

  ‘Bit late to be showing concern,’ she answered him. Fox got right into her face.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. Then, to Kaye and Naysmith: ‘We’re out of here.’

  ‘Going so soon?’ Laird was waving with the fingers of one hand as they stalked down the corridor.

  ‘I’ll need those statements,’ Pitkethly called after them.

  As Fox pushed open the door to the outside world, he saw Scholes hurrying in from the car park.

  ‘Looks like I missed the fun,’ he said with a grin. Fox ignored him, but Kaye gave him a shoulder-charge that almost felled him. Scholes didn’t react. His laughter followed them to the Mondeo.

  ‘Where to?’ Kaye asked.

  ‘Home,’ Fox stated.

  They didn’t say anything for the first few miles. It was Naysmith who broke the silence. ‘Poor woman.’

  Kaye just nodded.

  ‘Reckon we should have stayed?’

  Kaye looked to Fox, but saw he wasn’t going to answer. He was staring out of the passenger-side window, forehead almost touching it.

  ‘I can’t see that we did anything wrong,’ Kaye announced, trying for more certainty than he felt. ‘We were the ones making her frantic, so we left.’

  ‘But it was me, wasn’t it? Telling her Carter was out …’

  ‘Wasn’t our job to keep the facts from her, Joe.’

  ‘You sound,’ Fox interrupted, ‘as if you’ve already got your report off-pat.’

  ‘It was her way of crying out for help,’ Kaye persisted. ‘We’ve all seen them.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ Naysmith corrected him.

  ‘You know the type, though. If she’d really wanted to top herself, she wouldn’t have stood at the window like that, showing all and sundry what she’d done.’

  ‘What if nobody’d been passing, though?’

  ‘Then she’d have phoned herself an ambulance. Like I say, it happens.’

  ‘I can’t help thinking—’

  ‘Then don’t think!’ Kaye snapped at Naysmith. ‘Let’s just get back to civilisation and write up what happened.’ He looked towards Fox again. ‘Come on, Malcolm, back me up here. She could have snapped any time, just our bad luck it happened when it did.’

  ‘We could have tried calming her down.’

  ‘In case you’ve forgotten, she was screaming fit to burst. Two more minutes in there and every nut-job in the neighbourhood would have had us cornered.’ Kaye kneaded the steering wheel with both hands. ‘I can’t see that we did anything wrong,’ he repeated.

  Fox saw that they were on the M90 again and had already passed Inverkeithing.

  ‘I need you to do me a favour,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a lay-by just before the bridge. Pull in and let me out.’

  ‘You going to be sick?’

  Fox shook his head.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Just pull over.’

  Kaye signalled to move into the inside lane, saw the signpost for the lay-by and signalled again. It was an area for large loads to stop, preparatory to being escorted to the other side of the estuary. Fox got out of the car and felt the fast-moving stream of traffic attempting to suck him on to the carriageway. There was a pavement, though, and it led to a walkway that crossed the road bridge.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Kaye called out to him.

  ‘I need some air, that’s all.’

  ‘What the hell are we supposed to do?’

  ‘Wait for me on the other side, as near to the old tollbooths as you can get.’

  ‘Want me to come with you?’ Naysmith asked, but Fox shook his head and slammed shut the door, turning his collar up. He had walked thirty or forty yards before a break in the traffic allowed the Mondeo to pass him with a single toot of its horn. Fox waved at it and kept walking. He had never crossed the Forth Road Bridge like this before. He knew people did it all the time: joggers and tourists. The noise from the carriageway was punishing, and the drop to the Firth of Forth seemed vertiginous, but Fox kept going, drawing in lungfuls of fumy air. There was a dog-walker coming from the opposite direction. She wore a scarf tied tightly over her hair, and offered him a nod and a smile, neither of which he returned with any degree of success. To his left he could see the rail bridge, much of it under wraps for maintenance. There were islands down there, too, and over to the right the port of Rosyth. The wind was ripping at his ears, but he felt it was as much as he deserved. Kaye was right, of course: a cry for help rather than a serious effort. But all the same. They’d dropped a bomb on her with the news of Paul Carter, then simply walked away. No call to social services or whoever else might willingly check on her. A neighbour? A relative in the area? No, they’d cared more for their own skins and that bloody Mondeo.

  Fox hadn’t encountered too much violence or tragedy during his years on the force. A few drunken fights to break up when he’d been in uniform; a couple of bad murder cases in CID. Part of the appeal of the Complaints had been its focus on rules broken rather than bones, on cops who crossed the line but were not violent men. Did that make him a coward? He didn’t think so. Less of a copper? Again, no. But it was in his nature to avoid confrontation, or ensure it didn’t well up in the first place – which was why he felt he had failed with Teresa Collins. Every moment of his time with her could have been played differently, and with a better outcome.

  Fox rubbed his hands down either side of his face as he walked. His pace was quickening, the wind growing more biting still as he reached the halfway point. He was in the middle of the Firth of Forth now, steel cables holding him aloft. He was depending on them to do their job and not suddenly snap. Without knowing why he was doing it, he broke into a run – jogging at first, but then speeding up. When had he last run anywhere? He couldn’t remember. The sprint lasted only a few tens of metres, and he was breathing hard by the end of it. Two proper joggers gave him a lengthy examination as they passed.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he told them with a wave of his hand.

  Maybe he believed it, too. He took out his phone and snapped the view, just so he wouldn’t forget. South Queensferry was below him now, with its blustery yachts a
nd boat trips out to Inchcolm Abbey. He started looking for the Mondeo ahead of him, but couldn’t see it. Had they had enough and left him to it? He double-checked the few parked vehicles, then heard a horn behind him and turned to see Kaye pulling in, having just crossed the bridge.

  Fox opened the passenger-side door. ‘How did you manage that?’ he asked.

  ‘Joe here got worried you might be going to jump,’ Kaye explained. ‘So we went round the roundabout, crossed back over into Fife, did the same at the other end … and here we are.’

  ‘Nice to know you care.’

  ‘It was Joe, remember – I’d have left you to it.’

  Fox smiled, got in and fastened his seat belt. ‘Thanks anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Nice walk?’ Naysmith asked from the back seat.

  ‘Cleared my head a bit.’

  ‘And?’ Kaye asked.

  ‘And I’m fine.’

  ‘We could have sworn we saw you jogging.’

  Fox gave Tony Kaye a hard stare. ‘Do I look the type?’

  Kaye smiled with half his mouth. ‘Wouldn’t have said so.’

  ‘Then I wasn’t jogging, was I?’

  ‘That’s your version of events, Inspector.’ Kaye glanced at Joe Naysmith in the rear-view mirror. ‘We’ll always have ours. But in the meantime, can I assume we’re headed back to base?’

  ‘Unless you want to visit a car-wash first.’ Fox watched Kaye shake his head. ‘Okay then. Let’s see if the news gets to Bob McEwan before we do …’

  10

  ‘Well now,’ McEwan said, as they walked into the office. He was leaning with the small of his back against Fox’s desk, hands in his pockets.

  ‘You’ve heard, then.’

  ‘Deputy Chief Constable of Fife Constabulary – the very man who asked for our help in the first place.’

  ‘But he’s pleased with the rest of our progress?’ Kaye commented.

  ‘Not the place for wisecracks, Sergeant Kaye,’ McEwan snapped back. ‘Suppose one of you tells me what in God’s name happened.’

  ‘We went to interview her at her home,’ Fox began. ‘She learned Carter was no longer in custody and threw a wobbly.’

  ‘We decided our presence wasn’t helping,’ Kaye added. ‘Discretion being the better part of valour and all that.’

  ‘What state was she in when you left?’

  ‘She was a bit shaky.’ Naysmith decided to answer.

  ‘A bit shaky?’ McEwan echoed. ‘Not the screaming abdabs neighbours claim to have heard?’

  ‘She did do some shouting,’ Fox conceded.

  ‘About police intimidation?’

  ‘She misread the situation, sir.’

  ‘Sounds to me like she wasn’t the only one.’ McEwan pinched the bridge of his nose, screwing his eyes shut. He spoke without opening them. ‘This gives them a bit of ammo – you know that?’

  ‘Does the Deputy want us replaced?’

  ‘I think he’s weighing it up.’

  ‘She wouldn’t agree to be interviewed at the station, Bob,’ Fox explained calmly. ‘We had to go to her.’

  McEwan opened his eyes again, blinking as if to regain some focus. ‘You told her Carter was out?’

  ‘That was my fault,’ Naysmith admitted. McEwan gave a little nod of acknowledgement.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘best get your side of the story down on paper and we’ll see what Glenrothes thinks. Anything else I should know?’

  Fox and Kaye exchanged a look.

  ‘No, sir,’ Fox stated.

  News of the surveillance operation on Scholes could wait: one little bombshell at a time was probably enough for the boss.

  Later, Fox went to the canteen for coffee, and remembered when he got there that he’d not had anything since breakfast. Egg-and-cress sandwiches were all that remained of the lunch offerings, so he added one to his tray, along with a Kit Kat and a Golden Delicious. When his phone rang, he thought about not answering, but checked the display and recognised the caller.

  ‘Hiya, Evelyn,’ he said.

  ‘Ouch,’ Mills said.

  ‘You’ve heard, then?’

  ‘Not much else being talked about here. Local press seem to be on to it too. You know how that lot will twist it.’

  ‘They can try.’

  ‘Did she seem suicidal?’

  ‘No more than any of us.’ Fox wiped melted chocolate from his fingers on to a napkin. ‘Are you still going to be able to help?’

  ‘Will you still be around for me to help?’

  ‘Hopefully.’

  ‘In that case … we’ll see.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means my boss might get cold feet.’

  ‘Buy him some socks.’

  There was silence on the line until she asked him how he was feeling.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You don’t exactly sound it.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’ He looked down at his tray. Only one bite was missing from the sandwich, but the Kit Kat was history. The coffee had an oily sheen to it, and he didn’t feel like starting on the apple.

  ‘All you can do is tell them the truth,’ Mills was saying. ‘Give your side of the story.’

  He could have told her: that was the problem, right there. Every story had a number of sides; your version might differ from everyone else’s. Back in Collins’s flat, had they been pragmatic, cowardly or callous? Others would decide the truth of it – and that might not be the truth at all.

  ‘Malcolm?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘Do you want someone to talk to? We could meet for a drink.’

  ‘I don’t drink.’

  ‘Since when?’ She sounded genuinely surprised.

  ‘Long before I met you.’

  ‘I must have forgotten.’ She paused. ‘We could still meet, though.’

  ‘Another time, eh?’ Fox thanked her and ended the call, then started rolling the apple across the table, from left hand to right and back again.

  Nobody suggested a trip to Minter’s after work. But as they left the office, Naysmith did something out of the ordinary – reached out his hand for Fox and Kaye to shake. Only afterwards did Fox see it as a reinforcement of the notion that they comprised a team. He drove his Volvo out of the car park and headed for home. He’d almost reached Oxgangs when he found himself turning towards the ring road instead. It was rush-hour busy, but he wasn’t in a hurry, not now that he had made up his mind. He followed the signs for the Forth Road Bridge.

  They had passed the Victoria Hospital on one of their drives around Kirkcaldy. It resembled a building site, because it was one, a shiny new edifice near to completion standing next to the old original complex. Fox showed his ID at reception and gave them Teresa Collins’s name. He was told which ward to go to and pointed in the direction of the lifts. He eventually found himself at a nurses’ station.

  ‘No visitors,’ came the reply when he asked for Teresa, so he showed his ID again.

  ‘I don’t want to disturb her if she’s awake,’ he explained.

  The nurse stared at him, wondering, perhaps, what use Teresa would be to him asleep. But eventually she said she would check. He thanked her and watched her go. Behind him, a row of half a dozen hard plastic chairs sat next to the ward’s swing doors. A young man had been sitting there, busy texting with his thumb. He was on his feet now, crossing to the dispenser on the wall opposite and treating himself to some of the antibacterial hand foam.

  ‘Can’t be too careful,’ he said, rubbing his palms together.

  ‘True,’ Fox agreed.

  ‘Police?’ the young man guessed.

  ‘And you are …?’

  ‘You look like police, and I pride myself on knowing most of the CID faces around here. Edinburgh, is it? Professional Standards? Heard you were in town.’ He was doing something with his phone’s screen. When he held it out in front of him, Fox realised it doubled as a recording device.

  The sandy-haired
young man in the black anorak was a reporter.

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, were you at Teresa Collins’s flat earlier today?’

  Fox stood his ground, saying nothing.

  ‘I’ve got descriptions of three plain-clothes police officers …’ The journalist looked him up and down. ‘You’re a dead ringer for one of them. Inspector Malcolm Fox?’ As hard as he tried, something in Fox’s expression must have changed. The journalist gave a lopsided smile. ‘It was on a card left on the armchair,’ he offered by way of explanation.

  ‘How about a name for you?’ Fox asked in an undertone.

  ‘I’m Brian Jamieson.’

  ‘Local paper?’

  ‘Sometimes. Can I ask you what happened in the flat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you were there?’ He waited a few moments for an answer. ‘And now you’re here …’

  Fox turned and walked in the direction the nurse had taken. She appeared around a corner.

  ‘Drowsy from the sedative,’ she informed him. Fox checked that Jamieson wasn’t in earshot, but kept his voice just audible in any case.

  ‘She’s all right, though?’

  ‘A few stitches. We’ll just keep her the one night. Psychological Services will assess her in the morning.’

  After which, Fox knew, she’d either be sent home or transferred elsewhere.

  ‘If you wait twenty minutes,’ the nurse added, ‘she may well drift off.’

  Fox glanced in Jamieson’s direction. ‘You know he’s a reporter?’

  She followed his look, then nodded.

  ‘What’s he been asking you?’

  ‘I’ve not told him anything.’

  ‘Can’t security kick him off the ward?’

  She turned her attention back to Fox. ‘He’s not being a nuisance.’

  ‘Has he asked to speak to her?’

  ‘He’s been told it’s not going to happen.’

  ‘So why is he still here?’

  The nurse’s tone grew cooler. ‘Why don’t you ask him? Now, if you’ll excuse me …’ She brushed past him and returned to her desk, where a phone was ringing. Fox stood there a further thirty seconds or so. Jamieson was back in his chair, busy texting. He looked up as Fox approached.

  ‘What are you expecting to get from her?’ Fox asked.