Squeaky Clean

Prologue
The ash was shot through with burnt scraps of newspaper, lumpy where the hammer had failed to smash the charred bone to dust, and slushy like dirty, roadside snow melt where the shoe box had started to let the damp in. Faint, pish-smell of a doused fire – spent charcoal and blackened meat.
The logo on the side belonged to a brand of shite trainers – the kind worn by bully victims and the lonely, sexless men they grew into. Of all the fucking indignities, McCoist thought, supressing both a manic smile and the coffee burning its way back up her gullet. She peered at the contents, eyes snapping shut with every flash of the camera, opening again dazzled and scorched but fixed on the grey powder mulching in the corners of the cardboard, the gloved hand of a SOCO sifting it as if looking for gold.
“Is it…?”
“Cannae say till the tests huv bin done.”
“But is it…?”
She couldn’t see the SOCO’s face for his surgical mask and the hood of his paper suit, afterimage spots dancing where his eyes must be. Other bodies moved around outside the tent erected over the shallow hole they’d dug in the ground, shadows going about bad business.
“Cannae say,” he said.
#
They had a recorder and a microphone, they had glasses of water and a jug between them, they had thick folders stuffed with papers lying perfectly parallel to expensive-looking pens. They had laptops and tablets and severe silences at their disposal. On the other side of the table, McCoist had a chipped mug full to the brim with cold coffee. The words on the side – faded by a thousand quick scrubs of the ancient, hairy Brillo that lived by the sink in the office mess – declared her the World’s Best Maw. The lanyard she wore said Detective Inspector.
It was three on one. A fifth – a greying man with crowns on his epaulettes and glasses hanging from his neck by a chain – perched on the window ledge. Referee? Lifeguard? Executioner? McCoist didn’t know. He hadn’t opened his mouth yet since the inquisition started, not even to speak his name for the DIR. Officially, he wasn’t there. Unofficially, he lurked and listened and scratched his balls now and again.
The old goat in the middle seat straight across from McCoist was also a superintendent. He licked a finger and leafed through some loose pages. He was a man who could make rustling paper sound very loud indeed. “And these remains, DI McCoist, whose were they?”
McCoist touched the handle of her mug, turned it slightly, but didn’t pick it up. “The remains were of an unborn child belonging to the murder victim, Dannie Gibb, sir.”
“The lab results don’t confirm that.”
“No, sir, but Mr Knightley stated so as part of his confession.” Which is in the paperwork right in fucking front of you.
“And you trusted completely in what he said?”
“Every word, sir.”
“Why?”
#
McCoist followed the man out into the garden, keeping her distance. He lumbered along in an old t-shirt and joggies, smelling unwashed and sour. If his head wasn’t naturally inclined to slump towards his chest, his shoulders hunched, he’d have had to duck to get through the door. The sweat on his back was a dark continent which tapered into an arrow diving into the cleft of his arse crack, the valley exposed where everything was spilling out between the gap of his too-tight clothes.
There was filthy plastic furniture on a paved terrace buckled by weeds. Beyond was a jungle, the dilapidated shed a half-hidden outpost in the bush. He walked to an island of fresh soil in the middle of the over-grown grass. He turned to face her and, with a shy smile, he dug at the patch of earth with his heel, like a child trying to break through an iced-over puddle. “Right here,” he said.
“Mr Knightley, I need you to wait inside while I make a phone call.” She didn’t worry at all that he would try to run away. While she waited for the cavalry to arrive and the return call from the sheriff about the warrant, Knightley offered to make her a cup of tea in his pokey kitchen that smelled of microwave macaroni and the overstuffed bin. A greasy window looked out onto the garden and what was buried there. “No thank you, Mr Knightley,” she said, her voice hoarse and dry in the too-close kitchen, palms slick and fingers wriggling out the excess energy firing through her.
“Dye mind if a huv wan? There’s biscuits in the tin an aw.” He tapped a clumsy rhythm on a shortbread tin with long, ragged nails. He had large, fleshy hands. The skin looked soft but hid the power of an industrial vice. The rest of him was the same – a gentle, blubbery overcoat on something more powerful than he could control. “Maw goat this when she wis in Edinburgh wan time an kept it full ae bickies ever since. A try tae…” – he wheezed then coughed into his hand with a phlegmy rattle from the bottom of his lungs – “…try tae keep it up, ye know? The…” – his chest made a noise a stone being sucked up the hoover – “…scuse me. The tradition.”
#
“I had no reason to believe he was lying.”
“Is that so? For someone of your rank and experience that strikes me as somewhat naïve, DI McCoist.” The super’s eyes were large in thick glasses, showing off red cracks and gunky corners. They didn’t blink enough. “Didn’t it strike you as odd he didn’t try to hide what he’d done?”
“Well, he’d certainly hidden Dannie Gibb’s body. If it wasn’t for the tip off it could have been weeks till she was found.”
“This tip off – who did it come from?”
“Anonymous, sir.”
The super sighed in a way that made it clear this was somehow McCoist’s fault. “You didn’t try to track the caller down?”
“Of course, sir –”
“The caller could have been Knightley himself. Isn’t that right?” The man on the super’s left – a DS with the wet-look haircut of a teenage boy and the sulky eyes and flushed cheeks to match – cut across her. Wee prick. McCoist made sure there was none of the deference she gave to the super in her eyes or manner when she turned to address him.
“No, that is not right, Sergeant. The officer who received the tip off was played multiple examples of Knightley speaking and confirmed he was not the caller.”
“Confirmed?” The DS smirked. “This officer, a PC…” – he made a show of looking through his notes, a clumsy imitation of his boss – “…Kirsty Ravani – she’s got a good ear does she? A big music fan is PC Ravani, eh? Not exactly a scientific test.”
“Mr Knightley has a distinct voice,” McCoist said (pitched too high and nasal for his size and with a breathless rasp – just the memory of it gave McCoist a shiver, fingertips squeaking across the skin of a balloon) but the DS ignored her and continued.
“Look, as soon as you show up at his door, he admits – without pressing – the whole charade with Miss Gibb and points out where he’s buried the baby. Let’s just admit there’s a good chance he tipped you off to the body’s location in the first place.”
“Charade? He battered and throttled that woman to death then cut out her –”
“We know what he did, Inspector,” the super said, sounding almost bored.
“Then why are you asking me to explain it all again!?”
Less than silence – the sound of five pairs of buttocks clenching tight. The super slid his glasses up onto his expanding forehead and glared with the small, hardened, beady things he’d revealed. McCoist stared back, her left hand clamped to the arm of the chair to stop it trembling, the right snatching up her old mug and slugging a mouthful of room temp Nescafé instant – no milk, no sugar, undissolved granules dredging through her teeth. She grimaced and wiped her mouth with her cuff. The woman on the super’s left, a DCI, failed to hide a smirk. The DS had to look away, his cheeks flushing even more, jaw jutting out as he struggled to keep his gub clamped, desperate to say something, to give her in trouble, but knowing it wasn’t his place. In the corner of her eye, McCoist caught the mystery man smile – the same surreptitious twitch with which he scratched his nads from time to time.
The super’s shoulders heaved up and down in a deep breath, his glasses sliding back onto his nose with it. “Detective Inspector McCoist, watch your tone, please.”
“Sir,” she mumbled.
“So you took this man at his word?”
“The Macadam Street girls said he’d been a customer of Miss Gibb’s and that he was strange. He was hanging around, pestering her. Complaints had been made against him by other women. Miss Gibb’s belongings were found in his house and the remains of the foetus were buried in his garden where he said they would be. I took his word only because it was corroborated by other sources and the evidence, sir.”
“The evidence…”
The DCI pushed her tablet towards the super and flicked through some slides. McCoist saw a flash of jewellery on the screen. “Items found in Stuart Knightley’s house that belonged to Dannie Gibb,” she said. She looked younger than McCoist despite her rank. Her voice was pure private school blazer brigade – an accent impossible to lose. You can fake upwards but not downwards, McCoist knew. “Confirmed by DNA matches and supported by witnesses – women who worked at the brothel on Macadam Street with Miss Gibb and allege to have seen these things in her possession.”
“All quite neat then, wouldn’t you say?” The super looked back up at McCoist.
“The procurator fiscal was happy enough,” McCoist said, trying to get some steel into her voice.
“The fiscal have some questions to answer themselves,” the DS chipped in, leaning forward in his chair and uncrossing his legs so they now splayed out, a hand resting on each knee, the bulge caused by the zip of his trousers pointing at her. The super placed a hand on his shoulder and he sat back again, folding himself away.
“You didn’t feel the need to explore other avenues?” the super asked.
“At the time, the evidence seemed clear.” McCoist kicked herself. At the time. Seemed. Too close to admitting fault.
“You didn’t think to look into the possibility of a link to organised crime?”
McCoist shuffled in her chair, now feeling aware of how stiff her back was, the blood sitting heavy in her legs. “This is… this is all hindsight. There was nothing that hinted in that direction.” She jabbed her finger on the desk to emphasise each point as if laying it all out on the table between them: “Knightley was the victim’s customer, he’d been seen hanging around her at the time of her disappearance, he had her belongings in his house, the ashes in his back garden, and he confessed to the Whole Thing.” (Double tap.)
“But the brothel was owned by Paul McGuinn!” The DS slammed his hand down on the table, as if to wipe out McCoist’s invisible schematic.
“Says who!?” she snapped back. “Show me his name on the lease, Sergeant. Go on. Get me a utility bill. A bank statement. Get me a Tesco Clubcard catalogue that puts that name with that address.”
The super put a hand on the DS’s shoulder again, firmer this time, signalling McCoist to back down with his other. “That may well be, DI McCoist, but do you think if you hadn’t been in such a rush to charge Knightley and close the case, had you asked yourself whether Stuart Knightley might have motivation to confess, you might have come across such a connection?”
McCoist had to turn away, her face twisting into a painful smirk at the absurdity of a senior officer suggesting a slower approach would have been acceptable. She wanted to ask him what that would do for the targets, the numbers, the public relations, the politics, the bullshit. She turned an escaping chuckle into a cough and sniffed hard, her eyes starting to sting as they watered up, her bottom lip threatening to pout. These fuckers. How dare these fuckers? “No, sir,” she managed.
“Let me ask you outright, were you truly just being naïve here or were you being wilfully ignorant in order to close the case quickly?” the super said.
The look on the DS’s face showed the younger man believed neither of these things. Thought that it went deeper, that McCoist was rotten at the root, that she’d bungled it on purpose.
“I worked the case I had in front of me,” she said. “I worked with the evidence. I couldn’t have done any different.”
#
“Was it yours?” McCoist asked, head tilting at the window – steaming up as the kettle boiled – and the garden through it.
“Wit? Eh…” His brows furrowed, drawing creases across his forehead as thick as corduroy piping. A Simple Simon look. “Well, now ye says that, a, eh…” The kettle clicked and he stood much quicker than his large frame would seem to allow, making McCoist flinch for the first time since she’d come into his home – this glaikit man who had committed an atrocity, with the strength to choke the life out of a woman, saw her open, and then…
“Did you do it because you thought it wasn’t yours or because you thought it was?”
Knightley seemed to be puzzling this out, huffing as he mixed his brew – half water and half milk with three sugars. He drank with the teabag still floating in it then fell into another fit of crackling and wheezing. He faced McCoist, face red and dripping. “Either. Either wouldnae be good, would it?” He pawed through the biscuit tin, sieving and turning the Penguins and Viscounts and Blue Ribands.
The heating was up high; McCoist felt her skin prickle with it. She felt the stuffy, swampy existence Knightley lived within the confines of the two-bedroom council kip he’d shared with his maw. She was out living in some pensioner pen now but the décor looked as if she’d never left. Only Knightley’s bedroom was a reprieve from seventies faux-walnut and swirling floral fabrics in washed out pinks and blues and oranges.
Most of the space was given over to a bed with a caved-in mattress, the floor hidden by trampled clothes, the walls by sun-bleached film and fitbaw posters with the odd page 3 plastered here and there. A dusty shelf displayed Celtic bobbleheads (players long retired), cans of Lynx and Right Guard and tubs of hair gel, and an action figure of Al Pacino as Tony Montana, posing with his ‘little friend’. It smelled like a gym changing room and gave McCoist a creeping fear that the prickling she felt wasn’t due to the sweaty heat but because there were mites crawling around under her clothes.
After Knightley had been taken away, no need for cuffs, Scenes Of Crime turned the room over. They had the benefit of gloves, booties and coveralls that could be burned afterwards. Didn’t take them long to find the hammer (still dusty) and a long kitchen knife rusted with dry blood. The team working the old shed found a recently used barbecue stinking of burnt meat and white spirit, scraps of newspaper kindling in the bottom.
#