Quintin Jardine - Aftershock

‘That list of members looks pretty formidable,’ said Becky Stallings. ‘There must be a few hundred of them.’

‘Yes,’ DS McGurk agreed, ‘but I can shrink it if I cross-reference it against playing records to identify those people who’re known to have been on the course in the period when the woman was killed.’

‘Do that, Jack, but I doubt if it’ll be that simple. Sure, we might get lucky and find an eye-witness who saw the woman and her killer and can give us a description, but still, our first job is just to identify her. So we need to find out from the members, not just those who were on the course that day, whether she used that path regularly, and if she did, whether any of them knew who she was.’

‘That’s assuming she walked it at all. Maybe she was taken there at gun-point.’

‘Across the golf course?’

‘Through the woods: you can get in there from the other side of the hill, off Clermiston Road.’

‘From what I’ve been told, they’re pretty thick. They’re also bounded by the zoo to the north. No, let’s start with the premise that she went there of her own accord.’

‘Regularly.’

‘Why?’

The detective stretched his long body in his chair. ‘As I see it, she either knew her killer, and he was with her, or he followed her. If he did that, my gut tells me that he didn’t pick her at random. He was watching her, he got to know her movements, and he chose his moment. From what we’ve been told, Daniel Ballester was meticulous in his preparation for each kill. He caught his targets off-guard every time, with nobody else around. I’d say we assume that the mark-two version is doing the same.’

‘Then let’s get after him, and let’s be meticulous ourselves. Prioritise if you want, but we need to interview all the members and staff as quickly as we can. Luckily we have telephone numbers for all of them, so we can do it that way. I want a dozen uniforms and a dozen phones, mobiles if necessary; give them each a batch of names and a question template.’

Stallings turned to look at a young officer seated at a desk behind her, a telephone held to his ear. She waited for him to finish. ‘Sauce,’ she said, when he had, ‘how are you getting on with putting together that list of artists?’

‘I’m getting there, ma’am,’ Detective Constable Harold Haddock replied. ‘I’ve contacted seven art galleries so far and built up a list of female painters on their books aged between twenty and thirty-five. So far I have eleven names.’

‘Did you factor in hair colour, given that our victim’s was jet black?’

‘She was female. Who knows what colour it was the day before she died?’

‘Are you cheeking me, son?’

‘No, ma’am. I didn’t think it was worth doing at this stage, that’s all. I’ll call them all back, if you want.’

Stallings grinned. ‘Don’t bother, Sauce; you’re right. And don’t mind me either. I’ll jump to the defence of my gender at a moment’s notice. Anything else to tell me?’

‘Yes. I’ve spoken to Mrs Dell at High-end Talent; she was Zrinka Boras’s agent. She has several other painters on her books; four of them are on my list, and she’s seen three of those within the last week, so I can score them off. I’m also just off the phone with the principal’s secretary up at the Edinburgh College of Art. She’s going to put together a list of female painting graduates over the last ten years, plus current mature students in the age-group we’re looking at, and email it to me. She made another suggestion, too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Schools. She said we shouldn’t forget art teachers either. I explained that we were actually looking at working artists, but she said that many teachers supplement their income if they can.’

‘What’s the nearest school?’ the inspector asked.

‘The Royal High,’ Haddock replied, ‘on the other side of the Queensferry road.’

‘No,’ McGurk interposed, ‘not quite. You’re forgetting Mary Erskine.’

Stallings frowned. ‘Who’s she?’

‘It: one of the oldest girls’ schools in the world, one of three run by the Edinburgh Merchant Company. It’s just across the road from the entrance to the golf club, not much more than a hundred yards away.’

‘Would it have an art department?’

‘Bound to have.’

‘Okay.’ Stallings turned back to Haddock. ‘Sauce, close the gap. Ask the education authority for a list of all female art teachers within the age limit, then contact this Merchant Company thingie, and ask them for the same information.’

‘Do you think I’m a hypocrite?’

She looked up at him, unable to contain her surprise. ‘Do I what?’ she gasped, spluttering as she failed to suppress her laughter.

‘You heard. Do you think I’m a hypocrite?’

‘And why the hell should I think that?’

Bob Skinner gazed at her.

A new Bob Skinner, she thought, yet again. He was sun-bronzed, and his blue eyes sparkled. He was ten years older than her, nearer fifty than forty, yet he seemed to have grown younger in the time they had been together. The network of care lines around his eyes had faded until they were barely noticeable. He was slimmer in the waist, thicker in the chest, and the tension that had emanated from him in waves a few months before had gone, replaced by an air of easy relaxation. She thought back to the man he had been in the depths of winter and marvelled at the change in him. And yet, for all that, he looked sombre.

His right hand lay on the restaurant table, his fingers toying with the stem of his wine glass, the big vein that ran down his bicep from beneath the sleeve of his short-sleeved shirt twitching with the movement. ‘Because I do,’ he murmured.

Aileen de Marco chuckled. ‘You’ll need to run that one past me again, love,’ she said, in her soft Scots tone. ‘You are a very complicated guy, sure, but strip all that away, and you’re also the straightest, most honest man I’ve ever met. You’ve done some serious things in your life, but I’ll bet you’ve never done anything that you didn’t believe was right. You and hypocrisy don’t belong in the same bed. . unlike you and me,’ she added. ‘Knowing how you feel about the double standards of politics, there are still times when I wonder how you and I got together.’

He grinned. ‘Fishing for them, are you? Aileen, my darling, you are the one politician I know who confounds all the stereotypes, and you’re the only one I’ve ever admired, apart, maybe, from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. You do not have a duplicitous bone in your body.’

‘Well, if you have,’ she retorted, ‘I’ve never found it. . and I’ve been over all the territory by now. Come on, where’s this nonsense coming from?’

‘That reminds me of a joke I heard in Canada at Easter,’ he said, as he picked up his glass and drained the last of the Raimat Clamor, his regular choice from the wine list of Trattoria La Clota. ‘There’s this Saskatchewan girl, on a plane out of Toronto, sat next to a power-dressed big-city woman. Once they’ve taken off, the Saskatchewan girl, being friendly and all, says to her neighbour, “Where you from?” The power lady replies, “From a place where they know not to end a sentence with a preposition.” The Saskatchewan girl thinks about this for a few seconds and then she says, as friendly as before, “Where you from, bitch?” ’

Aileen’s laugh caused the heads of the couple at the next table to turn in their direction. She waited until they had returned to their own conversation, then moved closer to him. ‘Very funny,’ she murmured, ‘but now you’ve come out with that bolt from the blue, don’t think you can kick my question under the table. Explain yourself, Deputy Chief Constable Skinner. That’s an order from the First Minister.’