Chapter Text
The surf swells against the rock. It is an exercise in repetition: the grey, the wet, the muffled drag and rush of water darkening the shore. High above, seabirds spiral on the wind. A log crackles in the fire. The dog’s ear twitches in response, half in a dream. The walls of the house are pocked with salt. Slate and strong stone. Two pairs of boots sit by the hearth, still damp and coated in grit from the beach. The dog raises its head.
Over the sound of the sea, the crunch of gravel under tires. A car door slams.
▬
Carl frowned down at the concrete as if it was an insult to his profession. The garage was irritatingly clean, no doubt in an attempt to erase the idea that a car might have even once parked there in the past twenty years—not exactly a wellspring of evidence, pertaining to murder or otherwise.
The photograph in his hand showed the same patch of floor he was looking at now, albeit marred by a dark spattering of blood.
“It’s a bit fucking weird, right?” he stated. He could feel Akram’s steady gaze on him, the weight of it boring into his back, implacable and precise.
“How so?”
“Would you keep living in the house your husband vanished from?” Carl asked, turning to shake the photo for emphasis. “All that gory history?”
The expression under Akram’s moustache tightened a little. Vanished spouse. Not a good fucking line. Carl bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from slipping out a curse, or worse, an apology—couldn’t start walking on tiptoe around the man’s past any more than he could his own.
The blood in the photo could be his. He’d spent enough time poring over the reconstructed scene at Leith Park to know that’s what it came down to. A rusted puddle. A patch of floor for someone else to avoid.
“You are currently staying in your ex-wife’s apartment,” noted Akram, jotting something down in the notebook he carried around in his inner pocket with the same dogged dependence other policemen carried around flasks. “I’m not sure you’re the one to talk.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like her blood’s in the floorboards.”
“I was hardly implying that you killed her—”
“Don’t think it’d affect the value of the flat if I had,” said Carl. “And it’s not half as nice as this.”
He touched the exit wound on his neck. It itched, which was a royal fucking pain, and prodding at it made him seem jumpy, which he wasn’t. So what if he’d done a walk-through of the house before heading to the garage. This wasn’t even an active crime scene, for fuck’s sake. Wasn’t like the assailant was hanging about waiting for Scotland’s brightest and best to come waving their badges around years after the fact.
Akram stayed in place by the door while Carl paced, as if he were an actual bodyguard keeping an eye out for errant shooters hiding behind the tumble drier.
“The driver’s door was open, like so,” Akram said, gesturing to the spot. “The placement of the blood is consistent with a seated victim, as is the bullet hole in the headrest and windshield of the vehicle.”
“The bullet which was never retrieved.”
“Correct.”
Carl pictured the scene: the thirty-two-year-old father getting into the burgundy Toyota, the shattered windscreen, the blood spattered in the footwell and across the concrete. He beckoned Akram over. Akram allowed Carl to angle him in place with solemn interest, taking care to cross-check the positioning with his own scrawling notes. Carl formed an imaginary gun, levelling it at his partner.
“No,” Akram pointed out. “The powder residue on the headrest indicated that the shooter was already in the car.”
“Of course.” Carl stepped behind him, two fingers brushing the short dark hair at the base of Akram’s skull. “Like that?”
In proximity, the pleasing smell of cloves overpowered a reflexive sense-memory of hot blood and the reek of cigarette smoke. As Carl could attest, there was no better way to become intimately acquainted with a floor than to bleed out all over it—the carpet in Leith Park had been mouldering with ash and the crumbs of microwave dinners long before he ruined it with the spray from his ruptured carotid artery.
On bad days, the smell of smoke had a habit of tripping him up and shoving him down the long dark stairs of memory into the path of an oncoming bullet.
“Close enough.”
He breathed in. No smoke. Cloves. Cologne. Cedarwood soap.
The tightness around his heart eased a little.
“If I’m shooting you at this distance, it’s fucking impossible to miss,” he pointed out. “They would've noticed brains all over the place.”
“Say I move. To put on a seatbelt, perhaps.”
The door adjoining the house opened. Framed in it was the widow Morvern McVeigh, mid-fifties, whose mask of politeness slipped at the sight of the mimed gun pressed against the back of Akram’s head. She blanched.
“DCI Morck, DI Salim,” she chimed with false cheer, brushing back the blonde hair from her face. “The kettle’s just boiled. I was going to make a spot of tea.”
Not widow, Carl reminded himself. Just the wife to a man that disappeared from his garage one morning in February 2007, leaving nothing more than a puddle of blood behind.
“Thank you,” said Akram, stepping deftly away from Carl, who dropped his arm a beat too late. “That is very kind.”
Without a body, they had to resort to street theatre like this, re-traumatising the victim’s family eighteen years after the fact. It was a miracle she’d let them into her home at all.
Sunshine battered the house futilely as Carl followed Akram down a carpeted hallway. A line of Velux skylights portholed the roof above—engineered, no doubt, to better immerse the family in the two-hundred-odd annual days of rain and inclement depression native to the area. The furniture in the sitting room was disturbingly cream.
“I’ll be next door, love,” said Morvern’s husband of ten years, a portly handsome man called Stuart, his shirt a startling white against his dark skin. “Milk?”
Before Akram could answer, Carl shook his head. Side by side on the small sofa, they watched silently as Stuart doled out the steaming tea with exaggerated care. Carl took his mug in a vice grip, already seeing it splash all over the pristine rug as clearly as he’d seen John McVeigh’s blood splash all over the concrete garage.
It was only after Stuart took the empty teapot back to the kitchen and closed the door soundlessly behind him that Carl spoke.
“Tell us more about your husband,” he said, leaning forward to meet Morvern’s eyes, direct but not unsympathetic. “We have the timeline, the reports. But not much sense of who he was beyond that.”
“Ex-husband,” Akram said, carefully liberating a digestive biscuit from the pack. “Mr. McVeigh was presumed dead in 2014, after the family’s petition."
“That’s right. We needed some closure.”
“There is not much personal material. Where did he grow up?”
“Johnny didn’t talk about it. He came up in west Belfast. A lot of young folk left for better prospects, to get away from the trouble at home. Johnny wasn’t into that sort of thing. I met him at a life drawing class in the town hall in Dunbar. I was bloody awful but Johnny had a knack for it. He painted that on the wall behind you.”
Carl craned around. The framed picture was nice enough, a storm-tossed firth in blue and yellow oils. A cramped scrawl in the bottom right corner.
“Nice,” he said, not mustering enough enthusiasm to pretend to give a shit about the finer points of art appreciation.
“He had a real talent,” Akram interjected, while Carl levelled his remaining willpower into not rolling his eyes. “And a feel for colour. It is very good. When was it, this drawing class, when you first met?”
“Autumn of 1997, I should think. Yes, October. I’d just started a night class in the community hospital nearby.”
“Did you ever meet any of his family, friends, old schoolmates?” Carl’s hand itched for his tennis ball. He settled for gripping his right knee, letting his nails dig deep enough to leave marks in the denim.
He tried not to imagine the pop of the gun going off in the garage. The body slumping out of the car, the blood dripping onto the concrete.
“No.”
Bodies. The crack of two more bullets. One for him and Hardy.
“Ever go back home with him? See the sights?”
“Johnny said he’d left all that behind him. I was everything he needed. Our life together was in the present, not the past. I don’t think he missed it very much.”
To Carl, that sounded like the smooth-talking charm of an abuser or the self-deluding mantra of a man on the run. Or neither. Perhaps people really did find a shared existence as part of one new whole. Not that he’d fucking know, with him and Victoria content to shred each other into smaller pieces with each passing year before she finally got bored and left him to come up with his own forms of petty self-destruction.
Carl’s eyes drifted to the mantelpiece, noting the large silver frame holding Stuart and Morvern posing in front of a church in their wedding clothes. An older photograph was propped beside it, colours faded somewhat from the sun.
It didn’t tell him much either: Morvern, younger and somehow more violently blonde, pressed into a strappy sort of dress with her arm slung around the waist of a short grinning man in his twenties. Black shirt, cropped reddish-brown hair and sideburns, the teeth on display a little crooked. Their faces drunk and vulnerable in the unforgiving glare of the flash. Carl could imagine bumping into that kind of man at a bar back in the day, some crack about his accent, a round of drinks to offset the sin of his Englishness and to garner goodwill—if he’d had enough cash, that is.
Not that Carl had much of anything back in those early days except a healthy dose of seething resentment. A chip on his shoulder, his first head of department had called it. You can’t talk to people like they owe you something, son. Ease off the hard man routine and you might learn a thing or two.
Some would argue not much had changed since then, save the size of the chip. Carl had the habit of telling those people to go fuck themselves, so what did he care?
There was another photo of the missing man in shirtsleeves and glasses, looking up from a desk lumbered with an ungainly computer monitor that dated the picture to the early 2000s. In the background sat an easel cluttered with sketches and brushes.
Then there was, of course, the passport picture clipped to the front of the file. The one Akram had left on Carl’s desk a week ago with nothing more than a long, meaningful look that said: this one’s worth solving. If they only knew where to look.
“So you knew the same people he knew,” prompted Akram, when Carl failed to follow up. “You would have noticed if anyone strange came by the house, asking questions. Looking for John, perhaps.”
“There was the one man,” said Morvern. Carl straightened, knocking the table with his foot. A drop of tea bled down the porcelain and muddied his saucer: a single dark tear. “A week before Johnny disappeared. But he had the wrong house. It was a different man he was after.”
If Carl had been holding a tennis ball, it would have crumpled under his fist.
▬
“So, not only did she not mention this to the police at the time, she remembered the name after all these years?”
Rose was clearly trying to catch Carl’s eye for signs of latent approval but he kept pacing, pulling at his bad shoulder to try and relieve the dull ache radiating through his arm. A reminder of the fallible nature of his own body—especially when faced with a liberal dose of buckshot, courtesy of one Lyle Jennings.
“Yes,” he barked. “A bit too fucking convenient, wouldn’t you think?”
“Sometimes the brain retains things that are too painful. It can take years for them to resurface.” Akram said this mildly, as if reading aloud from a report. “She could have buried this information after McVeigh’s disappearance.”
“Or she had a reason not to say anything.”
“Or she’s lying,” prompted Carl. “Someone peddling that many biscuits is hiding something.”
Akram looked affronted. “It is called being a good host.”
“Some of us call it bribery. From the amount you took, she’s got you wrapped around her little finger. You’ve been bought.”
“What kind?” From the pinched severity of Rose’s expression, she was desperately trying not to laugh.
“Waitrose. The kind with chocolate.”
“Ooh.”
“Hello, police investigation here? Aside from the quality of her biscuits, what else do we have to go off?” Carl glowered at the sparse board. So far they had a few newspaper clippings, photographs of the house and family. Parents, two kids. All grown now and living down south. “He came over on the boat from Northern Ireland before the peace process. There’s a lot of unanswered questions about that, starting with a mysterious past that should’ve flown a few red flags under dear Morvern’s nose.”
Akram straightened the papers on his desk. “Not everyone that comes from a bad place is hiding bad things.”
He said it stiffly, looking past Carl as if the board behind him held distant mountains. Rose busied herself with her phone, clearly pretending to respond to a text.
Carl didn’t flinch.
“Yes,” he agreed. “But most people don’t get disappeared from their garage without someone having it in for them. This wasn’t some bloke he pissed off at the pub. The gunman was waiting for McVeigh in the car. Someone came looking for him.”
“Someone came looking for Cathal Quinn, you mean,” interjected Rose. “That was the person the wife said they were asking after.”
“And do you not think that this Cathal Quinn might actually be our man Johnny here? That, in order to shed some unwanted attention from persons unknown, he might change his name before fucking off to the wilds of Scotland? A nice wife and couple of bairns to hide behind, along with a new life?”
The corners of Rose’s mouth pursed. “Aye, I suppose so.”
He wished, selfishly, that Hardy was in the basement with them instead of kipping on the sofa at home. He never had to tread lightly around his old partner, knowing the man could rise to Carl’s acidity with a bluntness of his own.
Rose spent too much time getting offended on behalf of other people. While Akram…remained as imperturbable as ever. But there was something in his deliberate posture, the way he flexed his fingers at his side that made Carl think that he wasn’t as unaffected as he made out.
For Carl, the image of the gunman left him in a cold sweat. For Akram, it was the unnamed place from which the gunman came. The past held enough dark corners for them both to get lost in.
“So, we need to find out as much as we can about Quinn,” Rose said, writing the name on an index card with thick black marker and pinning it in the centre of the board. “If we find what he was running from, we can find out what happened to him.”
“Right,” replied Carl, making the syllable sing with condescension. The fluorescent lighting was making his head ache. He kept seeing the shooter waiting for McVeigh in the dark. The same shooter waiting in the kitchen while he sweated the kid Anderson for acting like an amateur, when it was him that made the biggest blunder that day.
Over time, complacency sets in. The moment you stop looking over your shoulder is the moment the cold barrel of a gun presses against the back of your neck.
▬
Rose left at five, like a normal human being. It was easy to forget there was a world beyond the grubby tiles of their departmental basement, where real-life people moved in tidal patterns around the city, from home to work and back again without getting robbed, raped, murdered, or an exciting combination of the three.
The glare of the laptop on Carl’s desk had completed the process of searing Johnny McVeigh’s face into his retinas. Already he was becoming less of a two dimensional figure and turning into a man with a history that walked and talked and asked questions like “Come on Carl, if you’re so fucking clever, what the fuck happened to me then?”
Akram got up and started tidying his desk, making a ritual of putting on his coat and scarf. The scarf was a soft, red, and handmade, the sort of thing his daughters might have made him for Christmas. If Carl was the sort of man who asked his colleagues about their families and Christmases past, he’d ask, but he wasn’t and so he didn’t. He didn’t even know if the holiday was one the Salim family celebrated.
Before Carl could muster any of this into words, Akram spoke.
“If you are right about this case, Superintendent Jacobson will be pleased,” he said. “With the controversy around legacy inquests, it looks good that someone is looking for the truth. It appears these crimes are not given justice.”
“Free passes for everyone,” Carl shrugged. “Reconciliation’s just a word in the dictionary.”
“People get on with their lives, but they don’t forget these things. The country rots from the inside instead.”
Carl had found Syria on the map shortly after Akram first introduced himself. It didn’t reveal much. The thing about fifteen years on the murder squad was that it told you atrocities always happened to other people, in other places, under a different sky.
They didn’t follow you to where you lived and worked. Until Leith Park, that is.
“Akram—” he said, then paused. “You already knew."
“I had suspected, yes. A man is more than the face he shows the world.”
“So it’s okay? You want to go down this path?”
Akram looked genuinely confused. “It is our job to investigate. Do you not think we should?”
His eyes were stupidly dark and large. Carl scrubbed a hand through his beard, wincing at the grotty ceiling. He thought about the Lingard case, how often people had mentioned that Merrit was a miserable closed-off cunt while casting meaningful looks at Carl. Commonality with a victim wasn’t always comfortable. The more you stepped into another person’s shoes, the more you thought things like Christ, what if some maniac I’ve pissed off in the past thirty years locks me in a hyperbaric chamber?
“No, I mean,” he said. “It’s just got me thinking that if the past catches up with you tomorrow, if some bastard blew off your fucking head, I wouldn’t have the first idea of where to look. Of who to go looking for. And that bothers me.”
“Carl. You do not know because I do not want you to know. Okay?”
“I’m sure Johnny-boy there said the same thing to his wife.”
What the fuck was that? Carl grimaced, feeling the conversation slipping away from him into the crevasse of shit that had a habit of opening up under his feet. He was Akram’s partner, not his wife—hardly the same thing. And his last partnership had ended in a spectacular bloodbath, Hardy’s body lying terribly still next to him while he lay on his back and gasped at the ceiling like a gutted fish.
Not for the first time, he wondered how Akram’s wife had died. If it had been fast, like P.C. Anderson, or—
“You’d tell me, right?” Carl rubbed at the lump of scar on his neck. “If there was something that needed telling.”
A softness slipped across Akram’s face, tugging at the corners of his moustache. He placed his hands, both firm and warm, on Carl’s shoulders and looked him steadily in the face.
“Yes, Carl,” he said. “I understand.” He picked up his satchel as he turned to go, looping the strap across his chest and taking out a pair of leather driving gloves. Leaving Carl with just as many questions as before, if distracted by the image of Akram astride a motorcycle.
But, like a dog with teeth too long and sharp for its own good, he never knew when to let go.
“Is your name even Akram Salim?”
Carl blurted it out before he could stop himself. Akram stopped with one hand on the door and turned to look at Carl. He didn’t seem insulted or disappointed. If anything, the expression that twitched across his face was one of faint amusement.
Adding insult to mystery, he left without saying a word. What would any detective worth his salt think of that?
▬
Carl spent the rest of the evening riding out a wave of low-grade anxiety that tugged at his gut like a persistent, barbed fishhook. He dry-swallowed his pills at the sink. His own face stared back at him from the mirror, a muscle twitching in the hollow space below his left eye, cheekbones cutting into the line of his ragged beard, which was streaked with an ever-increasing clump of grey. He needed a haircut.
He needed a stiff drink, but Jasper had decided to become a real pain in the hole about Carl’s frequent habit of mixing whiskey with his antidepressants (prescription) after Carl had given him shit for smoking weed (illegal) inside the house.
“I didn’t say anything,” Jasper said, as Carl settled on the sofa and shot him a sour look.
“It’s one drink.”
“Like I said, do you hear me saying anything? You could share, though.”
“Hah fucking hah.”
“Better supervised at home than in some ditch with a bunch of cans, right?”
“I think they disproved that,” supplied Martin, en route from the kitchen to his bedroom with a truly enormous wine glass of Sangiovese balanced in his free hand. “But good luck. Carl is of the famously suggestible sort, I’m sure he’ll give you a snifter of the hard stuff and hand you the keys to the car with his holy parental blessing.”
Jasper sighed and traipsed off to his room. The loud pounding of bass did not follow. It was amazing what a pair of headphones could do to repair a fractured relationship, though Martin had yet to take the hint. Carl could hear the strains of some shrill aria spilling beneath his lodger’s closed door, mercifully too faint to register as a real annoyance.
The alcohol burned his throat in a good way. He swallowed. All those muscles worked how they should: a minor miracle really. At the hospital, they’d told him he was the lucky one. Atypical trajectory. A new lease on life that had some preaching Jesus and goodwill to all men, and Carl reaching for the nearest glass.
On his chest, his phone buzzed. He made a fool of himself trying to reach it, ended up groping around on the floor instead while the mobile vibrated itself out of reach under the sofa.
“What?” he finally growled, jabbing at the offending screen with his finger.
“Good evening to you too, sunshine,” said Hardy, sounding smug, like a man who’d played the woe-is-me card and spent the day doing fuck all. “Had a nice day, did we? Did you take a wee break to see the sights?”
“Oh yeah, Akram and I took ourselves off to Holyrood and climbed Arthur’s Seat, made a proper day out of it.”
“Finally take DCI Bruce at his word, then, and took a fucking hike? No offence, Carl, but I can’t see you making it down alive. Saw you wheezing like a bulldog taking the fucking stairs, man. It’s embarrassing.”
“Oh, when’s the last time I’ve seen you take the stairs—oh yeah. That’s right.”
“Carl, you cunt.”
“Takes one to know one.” Carl drained his glass and shifted himself into something resembling an upright position. “What’s this about then? I’m guessing you didn’t call just because you missed my voice.”
“Someone should make you a detective.”
“You’re sending me to sleep here, the time it takes you to come close to approaching a fucking point.”
“Jesus, Carl, I’m not interrupting something important, am I? Don’t tell me you’re having a wank.”
“I wish,” said Carl, then grimaced. “That came out wrong.”
“They’ve got you on the heavy meds, eh?” Hardy said, casual as if they were talking about the travails of Scottish weather. “You won’t believe it, but I’ve not been able to get it up either. Shocker, that one.”
“I thought you had that dragon helping you out with physical therapy.”
Carl rubbed his eyes, blinking back the sudden hot sting of—not tears, exactly, rather a bone-deep tiredness. He imagined Hardy sitting up in bed; not at home, the one in the hospital, the dead expression clouding his eyes like a fog rolling in off the sea, impenetrably grey and cold.
“Don’t give me nightmares,” Hardy chuckled. “Anyway, I wanted you to have a listen to this. The vic, McVeigh, I had a gander at his finances earlier. Aside from his income as the head of his own landscape company, he was raking in £20,000 pounds a year from an unspecified source. Not in one chunk, mind, just in dribs and drabs, in part to his personal, in part to his business account. I had the girls and boys upstairs do a light spot of chasing—”
“I wouldn’t trust them to chase down their own holes.”
“Oh ye of little faith. Anyway, someone up there has half a brain, cause guess where they traced the money back to?”
“Where?” Carl asked, already running the list through his head. “Don’t say—”
“It’s us. Well, not us us. Government us. M15, to be exact.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Yeah,” Hardy agreed, with clear glee. “Damn fucking right. Someone made a proper balls out of it, so no wonder they never followed up. Bit embarrassing, isn't it?”
“It’s a sight more than embarrassing.” Carl felt his headache returning with a vengeance. “So what, now we’re looking into how the British government let one of their informers vanish into thin air, without so much as a tatty bye?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Christ, Hardy. You’re lucky I don’t sleep much anyway.”
“Me, I sleep like a fucking baby knowing it’s not my cock-ups that have some poor cunt in witness protection get Shanghaied in his own garage. It’s one of life’s many blessings.”
“Do you think Akram knows?”
“What the fuck are you on about, Carl? The man’s good, but he’s not a bloody psychic. Get you off to bed.”
“Fuck you, Hardy. Try showing up to work once in a while, won’t you?”
“Sweet dreams to you too.”
The phone felt heavy as a brick in Carl’s hand. He stumbled to his room and sat down heavily on his bed as the aching meat of his body caught up to him all at once: the drive to the house, the photos, the blood on the floor, the bullet, the damn tea. Akram’s hands solid and warm, anchoring him in place.
Carl slumped back to contemplate the ceiling. No one had said the job was going to be easy, but he felt like someone up there was really taking the piss on this one.