Perfect Dead: A gripping crime thriller that will keep you hooked

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Copyright

Broughton House and Garden, in Kirkcudbright, is the Edwardian home and studio of Scottish artist, E. A. Hornel, one of the early twentieth-century Glasgow Boys. It is owned and operated by the National Trust for Scotland. Any and all mentions of Broughton House and the National Trust for Scotland, beyond the mere fact of their existence, in this novel, are entirely fictitious.

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Jackie Baldwin 2018

Cover design by Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Shutterstock.com

Jackie Baldwin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008294335

Version: 2018-05-22

For Alex and Jenny

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Jackie Baldwin

About the Publisher

Prologue

June 2009

Ailish opened her eyes then closed them again as her head started to throb. She stumbled to her feet, fighting the urge to throw up. Unwelcome flashbacks of the night before painted her face in disgust. Looking at her slight form in the mirror with yesterday’s make-up blurring the lines of her face, she felt older than her nineteen years. She glanced at her phone and tears prickled. It was her mother’s birthday. She could picture her sister and father laughing and chatting as she opened her presents in Ireland. It was as if she had ceased to exist, such was the disgrace she had rained down on them when she ran off with Patrick, three years ago. He had completely turned her head with all his big talk. She had fancied they would live in London, not the tiny harbour town of Kirkcudbright tucked away in a corner of south-west Scotland. Instead of the romantic existence she had pictured for them, they had wound up living in this glorified hippie commune or, ‘The Collective’, as they liked to be known. At first it had been fun, exciting even. A world away from the parochial narrow-minded community she had left behind. She had been proud to be Paddy’s muse and loved nothing more than to bask in the warmth of his regard as he painted her from various angles.

Lately, she had felt Patrick’s love receding like an outgoing tide. He was preoccupied and distant and hadn’t asked her to pose for him in ages. The atmosphere in the house was different as well. She had a feeling they were all keeping secrets from her and each other. They had always used drugs but lately the drugs had become harder and the parties more forced and a little weirder. There was a powerful undertow dragging them all down to God knows where.

Suddenly, as she looked out of the window, she knew with unusual clarity that she didn’t want to be part of this toxic environment anymore. She would lay it on the line with Patrick and ask him to leave with her. He had been holed up in his studio for days now. She’d been warned off disturbing him as he was working on something new. Well, tough! This couldn’t wait. He would see sense. He had to.

After a quick shower she threw on her favourite dress and swept up her long curly hair, just as he liked it. A slick of lipstick and a touch of mascara and she was ready to do battle.

She flung open the door to the studio and stood, open mouthed, tears spilling from her eyes as she took in the scene before her. A beautiful young girl stared back at her insolently, maintaining her pose. She was reclining naked on a velvet chaise longue, one arm positioned behind her head. Only the blush of colour staining her chest betrayed her.

Patrick turned round, and their eyes met. He dropped his gaze. There was nothing left to say. Wordlessly, Ailish spun on her heel and left the studio. She was done. It was time to go home and beg for forgiveness.

Standing at the bottom of the drive, her eyes misted with tears, she looked back up at the brooding Victorian house with no sign of the maggots crawling within. She texted her elder sister, Maureen.

‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I’m on my way home. Ailish. x’

Walking towards the bus stop, she heard her name being called. Surprised, she glanced behind her. When she saw who it was, she smiled and walked towards him. The bus wasn’t due for another hour. She had time.

Soon she was ensconced in a comfy armchair, knees drawn up under her, a warm mug of hot chocolate clasped in her hands. As she poured out her woes he leaned forward attentively. The drink was comforting, strong and sweet.

She paused. She didn’t feel so good. Her eyes couldn’t focus. She struggled to stand up, but her legs wouldn’t support her and she collapsed back onto the chair. Alarmed now, her heart flopped in an irregular rhythm as she tried to make sense of what was happening to her.

‘Help me,’ she whispered, looking up at him. This couldn’t be happening. She didn’t understand.

He remained where he was, a creeping malevolence revealing itself to her. She was on the verge of losing consciousness when he picked up her unresisting body and carried her into another room. He laid her on a thick plastic sheet.

A last tear tipped from her eyes.

She would never see her home again.

Chapter One

7th January 2013

DI Frank Farrell glanced across at Mhairi as the police car slid and bumped its way along an icy farm track towards a small stonewashed cottage. It was 10.10 a.m. and the sky was bright with a pale wintery sun. A young police officer who worked out of Kirkcudbright stood in front of the blue and white tape and walked towards them as they parked alongside the SOCO van.

Farrell exited the car with a feeling of dread in his stomach. In his time as a practising Catholic priest, suicides, in particular, always had a profound effect on him. The thought that someone might be driven to die at their own hand was unfathomable.

‘SOCO nearly done in there, PC McGhie?’

‘Yes, sir, they reckon it’s fairly cut and dried. The police surgeon is in there too. Didn’t exactly have to look for a pulse. Blood and brains everywhere.’

Farrell quelled him with a look.

‘Do we know the name of the deceased yet?’

‘Monro Stevenson, according to the opened mail, sir.’

Silently, Mhairi and Farrell suited up in their protective plastic coveralls and overshoes. Even if it was suicide, care had to be taken not to contaminate the scene, just in case.

‘Right, let’s get this over with,’ said Farrell.

He opened the door and entered with Mhairi.

A middle-aged man in a tweed jacket and cords was packing away his stethoscope in a brown leather satchel in the hall. He straightened up as they approached. Farrell noticed that he had an unhealthy greyish tinge to his face and that his hands were shaking.

‘Morning, Doctor. DI Farrell and DC McLeod.’

‘Dr Allison. Cause appears to be suicide. A terrible business,’ he said. ‘A patient of mine, as it turns out. He was only twenty-seven.’

‘It must be difficult when you know the deceased,’ said Mhairi.

‘Yes, if only he had come to me. I could have got him some help. Anything to avoid this,’ he said, gesturing towards the other room.

‘Any chance you can give us an indication of the time of death?’ asked Farrell.

‘Well, as you know, my role here is restricted to pronouncing life extinct. However, given that rigor is at its peak, I would hazard a guess, strictly off the record, that he died somewhere around fifteen hours ago. However, you’ll need to wait for the preliminary findings from the pathologist for any degree of certainty.’

‘Thanks, Doctor,’ said Farrell. ‘I appreciate the heads-up.’

The doctor turned to leave. Farrell approached the two experienced Scene of Crime officers, Janet White and Phil Tait, who were gathering their stuff together at the rear of the hall.

‘Janet, what have you got for us?’

‘It looks like a suicide,’ she said. ‘Gun placed in the mouth and trigger pulled. We lifted prints from the gun. Gunshot residue on the right hand of the deceased matches that scenario.’

‘There’s a note,’ Phil said. ‘It’s in a sealed envelope. We’ll get you a copy once we’ve done the necessary checks back at the station. We’ve also removed the gun for ballistics analysis.’

‘What was it?’

‘A PPK 380 mm. We recovered the bullet from the wall behind the chair.’

‘How on earth did he get hold of one of those in this neck of the woods?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ shrugged Phil.

‘A suicide note,’ said Mhairi. ‘That means it’s unlikely to be a murder?’

‘Unless he was coerced, or it was staged,’ said Farrell.

A thought occurred to him and he popped his head out the front door.

‘PC McGhie, were the lights on or off when you arrived at the scene?’

‘Off, sir,’ he answered.

Everyone left but Farrell and McLeod. They stood in the doorway to the sitting room. A malodorous smell hung in the air, the coppery scent of blood mingled with gunpowder, faeces, and urine. Not for the first time, Farrell railed at the indignity of death. Wordlessly, he took a small jar out his pocket and offered it to Mhairi. They both smeared menthol beneath their noses to enable them to complete their observations without losing their breakfast; though he figured it might be a close call as he glanced at Mhairi’s white face.

There were two wingback chairs either side of an unlit log fire, with a large rectangular mahogany coffee table between them. In one of the chairs a body was slumped. The face was intact, but the back of the head was a tangled mess of hair, blood, and brain tissue. The corpse was stiff, like a mannequin. On the table there was a half-full bottle of malt whisky. An empty glass lay at the deceased’s end of the table. Farrell walked into the room and crouched down to examine the table’s surface.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s a faint glass rim on the opposite side as well. Could suggest that he’d had company earlier in the evening. Look in the kitchen and see if there’s a matching crystal glass anywhere. The two rims are the same diameter.’

Mhairi left for the kitchen, and he heard the sound of cupboards opening and closing. A short while later she returned.

‘No sign of it, sir.’

‘Now, that’s odd,’ said Farrell.

‘Couldn’t it simply be that the same glass was moved across the table for some reason?’

‘Be a bit of a stretch from his side. No, I reckon he may have had company last night.’

Farrell stood up and turned his attention to the rest of the living room. It was furnished traditionally, with a walnut grandfather clock in one corner, and a carpet in muted greens and gold that had clearly seen better days. There was a photo of a dark-haired smiling young man holding a glass trophy and shaking hands with someone in a suit. Another of him in the middle of two beaming parents. A third showed him with an attractive blonde girl, posing at the top of a snowy mountain in ski gear.

‘He looks so happy in those,’ said Mhairi. ‘Hard to believe he killed himself.’

‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Farrell. ‘Whatever happened here, we owe it to his family to determine the truth, however painful it may be to hear.’

‘I feel sorry for the cleaner that found him. Imagine happening on this with no warning?’ said Mhairi.

‘It’s as well she did,’ said Farrell. ‘It doesn’t take long for a body to become infested.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘She’s waiting for us at her home. I thought we could pop over and interview her when we’re finished here. Give her a chance to calm down and gather her wits together.’

They heard the sound of the mortuary van bumping slowly along the track. Leaving the room, they had a quick look round the rest of the cottage. Mhairi opened a door into a bright and airy studio, which contained a jumble of brightly coloured canvasses.

‘He was an artist.’

Farrell studied the works in the room intently. He was no expert in modern art, but the canvasses were visually appealing.

The bedroom was plain with no feminine touches. Only one toothbrush in the bathroom and no prescribed medication to be found.

The sound of muffled voices heralded the arrival of the mortuary van. It was followed by a car that discharged a young officer who looked unfamiliar to Farrell. As he’d been down in the Dumfries area less than a year, there were still plenty of officers sprinkled around the smaller towns and villages he hadn’t happened across yet.

‘Hey, Paul,’ Mhairi, greeted him. ‘You here to accompany the body?’

‘Drew the short straw for the last waltz,’ he said flippantly, before catching sight of Farrell.

Not for the first time, Farrell envied Mhairi her natural ease around people. He nodded awkwardly at the younger man, silenced now by his presence.

Sombrely, the three of them watched together as the corpse was zipped efficiently into a black body bag and loaded into the van. The young officer climbed in as well and the van departed, bumping back down the track bearing the ruined remains of a life.

‘And that was …?’

‘PC Paul Rossi, sir.’

‘We’d better go and interview the cleaner who found the body while it’s all still fresh in her mind.’

After a last look round, they locked the door and left.

As they reached the car, Farrell noticed a small cottage on the same side as the one they had just left, about one hundred metres away. It looked fairly rundown, but he could see the flicker of a TV screen through the front window.

‘Has anyone interviewed the occupant of that cottage?’ he asked PC McGhie.

‘No, sir, I didn’t even notice it when I arrived because it was still fairly dark then.’

‘Right, Mhairi and I will pop by now, just in case the occupant saw or heard anything suspicious.’

‘You’d think they’d have heard the gun go off at the very least,’ said Mhairi. ‘Yet, nobody called it in.’

Chapter Two

They walked along the icy lane to the cottage, the frost biting into their extremities. On the way up the path to the front door, Mhairi’s legs shot out from under her and she’d have fallen if Farrell hadn’t grabbed her.

He rang the doorbell. An old man opened it and peered out at them from beneath several layers of clothing. He was small and wizened with sharp eyes.

‘DI Farrell and DC McLeod. I’m afraid we have some disturbing news.’

‘Sandy Millar. I figured as much. You’d best come into the warm,’ he said, motioning them through with arthritic fingers to a small lounge where a coal fire was putting up a valiant battle against the frost clinging to the inside of the windows.

DI Farrell and DC McLeod perched on the edge of the hard, threadbare couch while the man settled himself into the chair opposite.

‘I’m afraid to tell you that your neighbour, Monro Stevenson, died last night,’ said Farrell. ‘Did you know him well?’

‘I didn’t even know his name,’ he said with a grimace. ‘Though, I’m sorry he’s dead. Kept himself to himself, he did. When the snow came last month, he didn’t even bother to clear my path or ask if I wanted a bit of shopping.’

‘Were you here last night from 5 p.m. onwards?’ asked Farrell.

‘I’m always here,’ he shrugged.

‘Did you hear or see anything unexpected?’ asked Mhairi.

‘I did, as it happens,’ he said. ‘A car came down the lane around 5 p.m. I looked out the window, as I thought it might be my daughter come to check on me. A big bugger it was. It went by, and I went to make my tea.

‘Later, when I was eating, it came back up the lane heading for the main road, but I never paid it no mind.’

‘Any chance you could hazard a guess at the make and model?’ asked Farrell.

‘It was dark, lad.’

‘Did you hear anything unexpected?’ asked Farrell.

‘Not a thing. I had the TV on, mind.’

‘Nothing that could have been a gunshot?’

‘The lad was shot?’

‘A shot may have been fired,’ said Farrell.

‘No, I definitely didn’t hear anything like that. You’d have thought I would have done. The telly wasn’t up that loud as I was waiting for my programme to come on.’

‘What programme would that be?’

‘The six o’clock news.’

‘Thank you,’ said Farrell, rising to go.

‘You’ve been really helpful,’ said Mhairi. ‘If anything else comes to you, please contact myself or DI Farrell,’ she said, passing him her card.

‘Will do, lass,’ he said, hobbling to the door to show them out.

‘Probably someone got lost and came down here by mistake,’ said Mhairi, as they got back in the car. ‘Once in the lane they’d have to keep going. The only place wide enough to turn is right at the end.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Farrell.

The address Farrell had been given for Fiona Murray was a one-bedroom flat in the centre of Kirkcudbright. The block looked rundown and as if it needed a coat of paint.

Farrell rang the bell and a portly middle-aged woman opened the door. She was as white as a sheet.

‘Fiona Murray?’

She nodded. Her eyes were hooded and expressionless.

Still in shock, thought Farrell.

‘DI Farrell and DC McLeod. We decided to pop round and save you the bother of coming in to the station,’ said Farrell.

‘Thank you. That’s most considerate. Please, come in.’

She swung the door back and motioned them inside.

The interior of the flat was spotless but spartan in the extreme. There were no personal photos or ornaments, except for a wooden, framed picture of the Virgin Mary on the mantelpiece. Probably the last thing she felt like was dusting round knick-knacks in her line of work, thought Farrell. He sat beside McLeod on the hard sofa, and Fiona Murray dropped straight onto an upright chair facing them.