‘We’re trained to look all around the crime scene. More intricately than a copper.’
As they prepared to leave, Duffy called after them.
‘Inspector Brodie? I know you don’t trust me. I know you think I’m just trying to muddy the waters. But ask yourself this – if I were The Embalmer, would I really be stupid enough to startkilling again while working in a place with security cameras covering every inch?’
Outside in the car park, Cameron filled them in on the phone call. ‘That was the station. They’ve identified our victim.’
‘Who was she?’ Brodie asked.
‘Emma Richardson, twenty-nine, solicitor from Dalgety Bay. Reported missing by her flatmate yesterday when she didn’t come home from work last Friday night.’
‘Any connection to Duffy?’
Cameron consulted his notes. ‘She had a loyalty card for that Asda. Used it regularly, including last Friday afternoon.’
Brodie felt his stomach tighten. ‘So she shopped where Duffy works.’
‘Gets better,’ Cameron continued. ‘According to the transaction records, she was in the store last Friday around 3p.m. Duffy would have been starting his shift, helping with the afternoon restocking.’
Art swore under his breath. ‘So he could have been in the store when she was there.’
‘Maybe he spotted her and took a fancy to her,’ Cameron said.
‘Maybe he takes a fancy to a lot of women in the store,’ Brodie said.
‘Right,’ Art said. ‘And how many of them end up dead on beaches three days later?’
They drove back to Glenrothes in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. The connection between Emma Richardson and David Duffy was circumstantial but troubling. Combined with his lack of alibi for the crucial hours before her murder, it painted a picture that was hard to ignore.
Duffy was still convinced that Mitchell the funeralundertaker was involved. They would have to swing by the funeral parlour again.
‘We need to verify everything,’ Art said as they pulled into the station car park. ‘Duffy’s alibi, the hours he worked.’
‘He doesn’t have one, remember?’ Brodie said. ‘An alibi. Maybe his neighbours will have seen him going in and out. Get some Uniforms to knock on doors.’
‘And if it all checks out?’ Cameron asked.
‘Then we start looking at who else might have had access to information about Emma Richardson’s shopping habits,’ Brodie replied. ‘Because either we’ve got a very unlucky coincidence, or someone’s been watching her for a while.’
As they approached the station entrance, Brodie couldn’t shake the feeling they were overlooking something crucial. The Embalmer case had always been about precision, planning and staying one step ahead of the investigation.
Now it felt like someone was playing the same game all over again. Picking up where he had left off. And he was only getting started.
7
JULY 2021
The silence had become unbearable.
Not the comfortable quiet of a Saturday morning lie-in, or the peaceful silence that settled over the flat when Maggie dozed off reading her crime novels in the armchair by the window. This was different. This was the hollow, echoing quiet of absence.
Mark Finlay stood at the kitchen window of his house on Perth Road, watching the grey November sky settle over the Tay.
The house felt too big now. Four rooms that had once buzzed with Maggie’s energy – her morning radio show competing with the coffee grinder, her phone conversations with her sister in Glasgow that could last for hours, her habit of reading newspaper headlines aloud whether he was listening or not. She’d been gone eight months now. The stroke had taken her quickly, mercifully, but it had left him rattling around like a marble in an empty jar.
He’d kept her coffee mug in the dishwasher for three weeks before finally washing it and putting it away. Her reading glasses still sat on the side table next to her chair. Some mornings, he caught himself setting out two plates for breakfast.
The converted office beside the kitchen had become his refuge. Maggie used to call it his ‘mad scientist lab’ because of the way he’d spread case files across every surface when he brought work home. Now it housed his growing collection of true crime books, his computer and the manila folders he told himself he wasn’t supposed to have taken when he’d cleared out his desk.
