Out of Bounds Page 3

  There wasn’t much online. Back in 1996, the news media hadn’t really embraced the idea of digital platforms. There was plenty coverage of the Dunblane primary school massacre that year, but most of that was retrospective. What had happened to Tina McDonald had probably been well covered at the time, particularly by the tabloids. But it had more or less sunk without trace since.

  Karen finally hit pay dirt with a website devoted to Glasgow murders. It spanned almost two hundred years and showed a devotion to detail that made her faintly queasy. She wondered whether her colleagues in the city knew about the site and the identity of its creator. He might be a bona fide obsessive. But he might be more than that. For now, however, she was grateful for his diligence.

  When Tina McDonald left her cosy single-end flat in Havelock Street on Friday the 17th of May 1996, she couldn’t have known she’d never return. Twenty-four-year-old Tina was off on a girls’ night out with three workmates from the Hair Apparent salon on Byres Road to celebrate the birthday of Liz Dunleavy, the salon owner. Tina was wearing a new outfit from What Every Woman Wants, a figure-hugging red dress with a sequinned swirl from shoulder to waist. Her shoes were new too, a smart pair of low-heeled red patent leather pumps.

  Petite blonde Tina took the underground into town from the Kelvinhall station to Buchanan Street then walked the short distance to the Starburst Bar on Sauchiehall Street where the girls were already ensconced with their drinks. Tina was drinking vodka and coke. According to Liz Dunleavy, quoted in the Daily Record, they had several rounds before leaving the Starburst for Bluebeard’s nightclub in a side street off George Square.

  The club was packed and the dance floor was full of bodies. At first, the girls stayed together but during the course of the next couple of hours they split up and danced with various men. Liz Dunleavy said they lost track of each other for a while. Little did they know the horror that was happening to Tina as they were dancing the night away without a care in the world. When they came back together around 2 a.m., of Tina there was no sign.

  But none of them were worried. It wasn’t unknown for one or other of them to pair up with a man and either go on to another club or go home with him. So even though Tina didn’t generally behave like that, the other three didn’t think anything was amiss. They queued up for a taxi from the rank at Queen Street station and went home, thinking Tina was having a good time with someone she’d just met.

  Next morning, there was a big shock in store for Sandy Simpson, the early barman at Bluebeard’s. Sandy’s first job of the day was to deal with the empties from the night before. He wheeled out the first tub from behind the bar into the lane where the club’s glass skips were situated. And there, stuffed behind one of the wheeled skips like a discarded piece of rubbish, was the battered and strangled body of poor Tina McDonald.

  Strathclyde Police struggled with the case. They revealed Tina had been brutally raped, beaten about the head and manually strangled. They later admitted they had DNA evidence, but no suspects to match it against. Literally hundreds of people who had been out in the city that night came forward to be interviewed and tested, but it seemed that nobody had seen Tina with a man and all the DNA tests came back negative. The last definite sighting of her was touching up her make-up in the ladies toilet of Bluebeard’s at about one in the morning. And then it was as if she had disappeared in a puff of smoke only to reappear the next morning as a murder victim.

  All these years later, still no one knows who took Tina McDonald’s life that spring evening. Nobody has paid the price for this cruel and heartless act that caused so much grief and loss to the people who loved Tina. It remains one of the shameful Glasgow murders that has no solution.

  Behind the sensationalism and the bad prose were the bare bones of a case that had remained a mystery for the best part of twenty years. No witnesses, no suspects – at least, none the police were prepared to go public with – and no closure for the people who had loved Tina.

  Now at last, here was a lead that might take them to the door of a man who had escaped justice for years. For Karen, the punishment wasn’t the most important aspect of her job. In her experience, the overwhelming majority of killers didn’t simply shrug off what they’d done and carry on as if nothing had happened. Their lives were distorted in one way or another by guilt and shame. More often than not, that final confrontation with their crimes seemed almost to come as a relief. In her book, the law’s retribution was only the final stage of punishment.

  What mattered most to her was answering the questions of those left struggling with the aftermath of sudden violent death. The survivors deserved to know how – and sometimes why – and by whose hand the people they loved had been snatched from them. It was easy to sneer at the idea of closure, but she’d seen at first hand how the cold case team’s results had allowed people to come to terms with their grief and loss. It didn’t always turn out that way, but it happened often enough to make her feel proud of their work.

  Karen printed out the blog entry and while she was waiting for the printer to warm up and spit out the pages, she searched for images of Tina. And there was the poster Strathclyde Police had issued in a bid to jog the memory of potential witnesses. It had obviously been blown up from a snap taken by a pal on a night out. In the age of selfies and camera phones, it was easy to forget that back then there were far fewer images to choose from when you were trying to encourage people to remember what they’d seen. When you were using film, you couldn’t tell what your pictures were like till you had them developed. And then the moment was past, with only a fistful of rubbish photos to remind you of a memorable occasion.

  The head-and-shoulders shot of Tina that accompanied the request for information was fuzzy and indistinct. She was grinning at the camera, a cocktail glass in her hand. A tumbled halo of blonde hair surrounded a face that might charitably be described as heart-shaped, with a pointed chin and sharp features. Narrow shoulders and a dress that made the most of her breasts. Plenty of men would have found her attractive enough to chat up, Karen reckoned. The problem was that there was nothing particularly distinctive about her. She wouldn’t have stood out in a crowd. And that was why they’d had so much difficulty in finding any decent leads, she supposed.

  Karen printed out the photo sheet and collected it from the printer tray. She rearranged the contents of one of their whiteboards to make room for the new investigation and attached what little they had. With luck, Jason would bring something more substantial. And then they could get down to work.

  6

  Usually when a new case hit the Historic Cases Unit, Karen had to be pried away from her desk at the end of the day. She always felt driven to absorb as much as she possibly could right from the start. First impressions were important; she would drill down into the detail afterwards, but she liked to have a sense of how the previous investigation had taken shape.

  But not on Mondays. Monday evenings were her time. Monday evenings were when she and Detective Chief Inspector Jimmy Hutton sat in her living room drinking gin and staring out across the glitter and swell of the Firth of Forth towards the clustered lights of the string of Fife towns from North Queensferry to Kirkcaldy. Karen had tried to tell Jimmy it wasn’t necessary any more. That she wasn’t going to fall apart. But Jimmy refused to take a telling. She suspected he needed their Monday evenings as much as she did.

  Long months before, Detective Sergeant Phil Parhatka had been killed in the line of duty. That was something that almost never happened in Scotland; there was no routine protocol for getting past it. Phil had been Karen’s partner. The love of her life. She’d fallen for him the first week they worked together and for years she’d been convinced it would never be reciprocated. And then it was.

  After they got together, Phil had moved from the HCU. He became Jimmy Hutton’s bagman, his trusted lieutenant in the quaintly named Murder Prevention Team. He’d been fascinated by his job and never imagined it
would be the death of him. And then it was.

  After the funeral, Karen ignored the advice of everyone who told her not to make any major decisions for a year. She sold the house in Kirkcaldy that Phil had left to her. She sold her own house to the couple who had been renting it from her. With the proceeds, she’d put down a substantial deposit on the flat on the Western Harbour Breakwater with the sensational view and absolutely no memories.

  Two weeks after the funeral, Jimmy Hutton had turned up on her doorstep on a Monday. ‘I thought you could maybe do with some company,’ he’d said, proffering a bottle of gin – The Botanist from Islay.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she’d said. But she was leaning against the door for support. Kindness, she’d recently discovered, was her undoing.

  Jimmy had sighed. ‘No, you’re not. And neither am I. I’ve not come to be maudlin. We’ve both taken a body blow, and we’re neither of us in a position to let that show in the day-to-day. I could talk to Phil and so could you. I thought maybe we could talk to each other instead?’

  And so she’d opened the door wider, saying, ‘I’ve got Fevertree tonic in the fridge.’ It had since become a Monday evening ritual. Gin sampling and conversation. They didn’t talk much about Phil. They didn’t need to; they’d both absorbed the terrible blow of his death and understood the cost of his loss. But when they did touch on him it was with affection and wry smiles. What they talked about instead was their work. Each had become a sounding board for the other. And in the process they’d worked their way through a series of interesting and sometimes challenging gins. Karen had a decided preference for Miller’s Westbourne Strength with its notes of cucumber, while Jimmy’s current favourite was Caorunn from the Highlands with its distinctive tang of rowan berries.

  Tonight they were going to broach Jimmy’s latest discovery – Professor Cornelius Ampleforth’s Bathtub Gin. And much as she loved her job, on a Monday night there was no competition. Besides, she’d already made a first pass at the Tina McDonald case. They hadn’t gone through the hundreds of statements yet, but just by looking at the way the paperwork was organised, she could sense that the initial inquiry hadn’t been a fuck-up. It looked at first glance as though the i’s had been dotted and the t’s crossed. What they’d lacked was an even break.

  Which was where Ross Garvie’s familial DNA came in.

  Karen was looking forward to telling Jimmy all about it. But as it turned out, he jumped in first with one of his own. Partly because he wanted it to be a cautionary tale for Karen. He knew about the walking and it made him uneasy. He knew what late-night streets in a big city could be like and he didn’t want Karen to come to harm. After Phil, that would be unbearable.

  ‘I can take care of myself,’ Karen had protested the first time he’d raised the subject.

  ‘Aye, and so could Phil. It’s not you that’s the issue, it’s the bampots and bawbags out there.’

  It was a topic he’d come back to more than once, sometimes directly, sometimes circling round it. Tonight was one of the more oblique ones. ‘Did you hear they had a murder last night up by Kinross?’ Jimmy swirled the ice cubes in his drink, clinking them against the sides of the tumbler. He sniffed at the glass, his nose wrinkling as he savoured the gin’s complex blend of botanicals.

  ‘What? One of yours?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, thank goodness. I only know as much about it as I do because we’re working with the victim’s social worker on another case altogether. She was telling me about it when I stopped by this afternoon.’

  Back at the breakfast bar, Karen filled a bowl with crisps and headed back to the far end of the living room where two sofas were angled together in a V-shape to maximise access to the view. ‘A domestic?’ She sat down and plonked the bowl on the triangular glass coffee table.

  ‘No.’ Jimmy helped himself to a handful of crisps. ‘Quite the opposite, really.’

  Intrigued, Karen raised her eyebrows in a question. ‘What’s that, then? The opposite of a domestic?’

  ‘Well, for a start, the victim wasn’t in any kind of relationship. As far as Giorsal knows, he’d never—’

  ‘Did you say, “Giorsal”?’ Karen interrupted.

  Jimmy’s eyebrows twitched upwards. ‘Aye. Giorsal Kennedy. She’s the senior social worker in the case.’

  ‘We were at school together.’

  ‘Aye, she mentioned she used to know you.’

  ‘We used to be pals but she went off to study social work in Manchester. Amazing. Giorsal Kennedy, as I live and breathe. Last I heard, she got hitched to some guy from Liverpool. When did she come back to Fife?’

  Jimmy shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. We’ve been working with her a wee bit more than a year now. You should give her a ring, I bet she’d be pleased to hear from you.’

  Karen snorted. ‘Now who’s the social worker? I’ve not seen the woman for more than fifteen years, we’d likely have nothing in common. Still, Giorsal Kennedy . . . ’ She pulled herself back to attention. ‘So, tell me about this non-domestic murder.’

  ‘The victim was a guy called Gabriel Abbott. A bit of a loner, by all accounts. He lived in a wee cottage near the Orwell standing stones.’

  ‘What? The ones that look like a pair of massive dildos in the middle of a field?’

  Jimmy laughed. ‘One-track mind.’

  ‘Hey, come on, what else do they make you think of? There’s nothing symbolic about them, Jimmy. They’re two giant willies. End of.’

  He shook his head. ‘Have it your own way. Anyway, apparently it was his habit to walk home from the pub in Kinross along the Loch Leven trail. So yesterday morning, some guy was cycling from Scotlandwell to his work in Kinross when he notices a man slumped on a bench at a viewpoint a few feet off the path. He thinks he’s maybe taken a turn of some kind. So he stops and checks it out, and lo and behold, it’s Gabriel Abbott.’

  ‘Dead already?’

  ‘Oh aye, dead a few hours at that point. At first they thought it might be suicide. Gunshot to the head, gun in his hand.’

  ‘But?’ Karen leaned forward, scenting something more.

  Jimmy pulled a wry face, setting his glass down on the table. ‘The entry wound was here.’ He pressed his fingertips to his right temple. Then he waggled the fingers of his left hand. ‘But the gun was in his left hand. So unless he was a contortionist . . . ’

  ‘ . . . he was helped on his way by someone who wasn’t quite as smart as he intended to be.’ She shook her head, puffing her cheeks as she exhaled. ‘Easy done, if you’re panicking. If you’re an amateur. So what’s the story?’

  ‘There is no story at this point. It’s as mysterious as that banker who got shot on his own doorstep in Nairn a few years back. You remember?’

  Karen nodded. No enemies, no debts, no motive. No witnesses, no trace-back on the gun, no viable DNA. ‘So what did this Gabriel Abbott do for a living?’

  Jimmy picked up his drink and savoured a sip. ‘Nothing. I kind of like this one, Karen. I’m getting a hint of coriander and cinnamon. Might be the perfect curry aperitif.’

  ‘You could be right.’ She took another swallow. ‘Spicy warmth. Nothing clinical about this one. But going back to the dead guy: how old was he?’

  ‘Around thirty, I think. Giorsal says he was bright, but he had some mental health problems going way back. He’d never been able to hold down a job.’

  ‘It’s hard to see how he would piss somebody off enough to murder him.’

  ‘It doesn’t always take much.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’ Jimmy looked at her over the rim of his glass. ‘That’s why—’

  ‘Stop right there,’ Karen said. ‘I’m not in the mood for one of your heavy-handed morality tales. Bad things happen in the dark. I get it. But bad things happen in the bright light of day too. Phil di
dn’t die because he was walking the streets at night, Jimmy. I know how to take care of myself. I know how to be safe.’

  Jimmy sighed and ran a hand over the undulating bumps of his shaven head. ‘Sure you do.’ His voice was heavy with the weight of disbelief.

  ‘So the local lads are struggling with this one?’

  ‘Aye. No witnesses. Nothing.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Karen stared out over the water. Sometimes she hankered after a live case. She loved what she did, but she couldn’t kid herself that it carried the same adrenaline buzz as the quest to build a chain of evidence in real time.

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s really interesting, Karen. Twenty-two years ago, Gabriel Abbott’s mother was murdered. And nobody spent so much as a day in jail for it.’

  7

  Karen let the Mint drive to Dundee next morning. Not because she was worried about how much gin she’d drunk the night before but because she wanted to mull over the case Jimmy Hutton had brought up. There were a lot of things that ran in families, but murder wasn’t one of them. Not even in families who made the criminal records computer ka-ching like a slot machine that had hit the jackpot. But there was nothing dodgy about Gabriel Abbott’s family.

  Equally, there was nothing similar about the two murders. After Jimmy had left, Karen had gone online to see what she could find out about the death of Abbott’s mother. It hadn’t been anything like she’d expected.

  Caroline Abbott, a successful West End theatre impresario, had made the fatal error of travelling in a small plane with a former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at a time when the IRA and its assorted splinter groups had been flexing their terrorist muscles. When the plane blew up over the Scottish Borders, the four people on board had died instantly. It looked open and shut, even though nobody had claimed responsibility. ‘Probably forgot the bloody code word,’ she’d muttered, thinking how often she ended up on the phone to her bank because she’d forgotten her memorable word.