The Distant Echo Read online

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  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 toward 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 coloring. Wide cheekbones gave his face a chiseled, 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 cozy."

  "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 pretense 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 toward 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.

  3

  The poetry of Baudelaire seemed to be doing the trick. Curled into a ball on a mattress so hard it scarcely deserved the name, Mondo was mentally working his way through Les Fleurs du Mal. It seemed ironically appropriate in the light of the night's events. The musical flow of the language soothed him, rubbing away the reality of Rosie Duff's death and the police cell it had brought him to. It was transcendent, raising him out of his body and into another place where the smooth sequence of syllables was all his consciousness could accommodate. He didn't want to deal with death, or guilt, or fear, or suspicion.

  His hiding place imploded abruptly with the crashing open of the cell door. PC Jimmy Lawson loomed above him. "On your feet, son. You're wanted."

  Mondo scrambled back, away from the young policeman who had somehow changed from rescuer to persecutor.

  Lawson's smile was far from soothing. "Don't get your bowels in a confusion. Come on, look lively. Inspector Maclennan doesn't like being kept waiting."

  Mondo edged to his feet and followed Lawson out of the cell and into a brightly lit corridor. It was all too sharp, too defined for Mondo's taste. He really didn't like it here.

  Lawson turned a bend in the corridor then flung a door open. Mondo hesitated on the threshold. Sitting at the table was the man he'd seen up on Hallow Hill. He looked too small to be a copper, Mondo thought. "Mr. Kerr, is it?" the man asked.

  Mondo nodded. "Aye," he said. The sound of his own voice surprised him.

  "Come in and sit down. I'm DI Maclennan, this is DC Burnside."

  Mondo sat down opposite the two men, keeping his eyes on the table top. Burnside took him through the formalities with a politeness that surprised Mondo, who had expected TheSweeney: all shouting and macho swaggering.

  When Maclennan took over, a note of sharpness entered the conversation. "You knew Rosie Duff," he said.

  "Aye." Mondo still didn't look up. "Well, I knew she was the barmaid at the Lammas," he added as the silence grew around them.

  "Nice looking lassie," Maclennan said. Mondo did not respond. "You must have noticed that, at least."

  Mondo shrugged. "I didn't give her any thought."

  "Was she not your type?"

  Mondo looked up, his mouth hitched up in one corner in a half-smile. "I think I definitely wasn't her type. She never took any notice of me. There were always other guys she was more interested in. I always had to wait to get served in the Lammas."

  "That must have annoyed you."

  Panic flashed in Mondo's eyes. He was beginning to understand that Maclennan was sharper than he had expected a copper to be. He was going to have to box clever and keep his wits about him. "Not really. If we were in a hurry, I just used to get Gilly to go up when it was my round."

  "Gilly? That would be Alex Gilbey?"

  Mondo nodded, dropping his eyes again. He didn't want to let this man see any of the emotions churning inside him. Death, guilt, fear, suspicion. He desperately wanted to be out of this, out of the police station, out of the case. He didn't want to drop anyone else in it in the process, but he couldn't take this. He knew he couldn't take it, and he didn't want to end up acting in a way that would make these cops think there was something suspicious about him, something guilty. Because he wasn't the suspicious one. He hadn't chatted up Rosie Duff, much as he might have wanted to. He hadn't stolen a Land Rover. All he'd done was borrow it to drive a lassie home to Guardbridge. He hadn't stumbled over a body in the snow. That was down to Alex. It was thanks to the others he was in the middle of this shit. If keeping himself secure meant making the cops look elsewhere, well, Gilly would never find out. Even if he did, Mondo was sure Gilly would forgive him.

  "So she liked Gilly, did she?" Maclennan was relentless.

  "I don't know. Far as I'm aware, he was just another customer to her."

  "But one she paid more attention to than she did to you." "Aye, well, that didn't exactly make him unique."

  "Are you saying Rosie was a bit of a flirt?"

  Mondo shook his head, impatient at himself. "No. Not at all. It was her job. She was a barmaid, she had to be nice to people."

  "But not to you."

  Mondo tugged nervously at the ringlets falling round his ears. "You're twisting this. Look, she was nothing to me, I was nothing to her. Now, can I go, please?"

  "Not quite yet, Mr. Kerr. Whose idea was it tonight to come back via Hallow Hill?"

  Mondo frowned. "It wasn't anybody's idea. That's just the quickest route from where we were back to Fife Park. We often walk back that way. Nobody gave it a second thought."

  "And did any of you ever feel the need to run up to the Pictish cemetery before?"

  Mondo shook his head. "We knew it was there, we went up to look at it when they were excavating it. Like half of St. Andrews. Doesnae make us weirdos, you know."

  "I never said it did. But you never made a detour there on the way back to your residence before?"

  "Why would we?"

  Maclennan shrugged. "I don't know. Daft boys games. Maybe you've watched Carriea few too many times."

  Mondo tugged at a lock of his hair. Death, guilt, fear, suspicion. "I'm not interested in horror films. Look, Inspector, you're reading this all wrong. We're just four ordinary guys that walked into the middle of something extraordinary. Nothing more, nothing less." He spread his hands in a gesture of innocence that he prayed was convincing. "I'm sorry for what happened to the lassie, but it's got nothing to do with me."

  Maclennan leaned back in his chair. "So you say." Mondo said nothing, simply letting his breath out in a long sigh of frustration. "What about the party? What were your movements there?"

  Mondo twisted sideways in his seat, his desire for escape obvious
in every muscle. Would the lassie talk? He doubted it. She'd had to sneak in to the house, she'd been supposed to be home hours before. And she wasn't a student, had known almost nobody there. With a bit of luck, she'd never be mentioned, never questioned. "Look, why do you care about this? We just found a body, you know?"

  "We have to explore all the possibilities."

  Mondo sneered. "Just doing your job, eh? Well, you're wasting your time if you think we had anything to do with what happened to her."

  Maclennan shrugged. "Nevertheless, I'd like to know about the party."

  Stomach churning, Mondo produced an edited version he hoped would pass muster. "I don't know. It's hard to remember every detail. Not long after we arrived, I was chatting up this lassie. Marg, her name was. From Elgin. We danced for a while. I thought I was in there, you know?" He pulled a rueful face. "Then her boyfriend turned up. She hadn't mentioned him before. I was pretty fed up, so I had a couple more beers, then I went upstairs. There was this wee study, just a box-room really, with a desk and a chair. I sat there feeling sorry for myself for a bit. Not long, just the time it took to drink a can. Then I went back downstairs and mooched around. Ziggy was giving some English guys his Declaration of Arbroath speech in the conservatory, so I didn't hang around there. I've heard it too many times. I didn't really pay attention to anybody else. There wasn't much in the way of talent, and what there was was spoken for, so I just hung around. Tell you the truth, I was ready to go ages before we finally left."