Song of the Dead Read online

  John Baden and Emily King got together at university. Aberdeen. He was from Dingwall, she was Canadian, from Toronto. They moved in together in Marybank, just off the Dingwall to Contin road, and they set up an internet business. Copywriting. That’s what it says, although there’s not very much information on it. An incomplete picture, as though Rosco couldn’t be bothered with the details, like it wasn’t interesting enough for him. The yawn of copywriting.

  They took a holiday to the Baltic. Ten days, travelling around. Flew into Helsinki, took the ferry to Tallinn, intending to visit Riga, Vilnius, and St Petersburg, before heading back to Helsinki for the flight home.

  They hired a car to drive from Tallinn to Riga. Stopped off in the university town of Tartu. Booked into a hotel called the Centre. The Centre Hotel. From the photograph it looks just as awful and dull as the name suggests. This was still only twelve years after the fall of the Soviet Union, so much of it was yet to change.

  Spent two nights in Tartu, which seems odd in itself, if you’re intending to do a tour of capitals, and St Petersburg. Maybe it’s a fun place. I’d never heard of Tartu until I spoke to Quinn.

  The second evening they went out for dinner, walked around the old town square, sat in a couple of bars. The things you do on holiday. Went back to their room. Had sex, went to sleep.

  She woke up the next morning and he was gone. Not completely gone, as in he’d taken all his clothes and left a note saying he couldn’t stand it any more. Nevertheless, gone, jacket and shoes included.

  She presumed he’d been unable to sleep and had gone out for a walk. He’d always been an early riser. She went back to bed. Woke up some time after nine, he still wasn’t there. She showered, got dressed, went downstairs and had a cup of coffee and a piece of bread for breakfast, positioning herself in such a way that she’d see him return to the hotel.

  He never returned.

  She went looking for him. Having just arrived the night before, she obviously didn’t know the town too well. Few people spoke English. No one at the hotel was able to help her. By mid-afternoon she went to the police. She didn’t find them very interested in the first instance. Who would be? A grown man missing for six hours? However odd it appeared to her, it didn’t appear very odd to them. Estonia had opened up to Western Europe, and back then, one of the ways in which it was opening up was by selling alcohol and sex.

  She sat in her hotel room the rest of the day, waiting for the door to open. She slept fitfully, and the next morning she returned to the police station. From there she called the British Embassy in Tallinn. They sent someone down.

  The story never really captured the imagination of the British press. Even after three days it seems that most people still presumed he was drunk somewhere. Missing children and attractive young women are what the media want to report. A guy in his mid-twenties who was likely still out on the lash was of little interest.

  At this stage the British police were not involved. DI Rosco first heard about the case when the Dingwall station was contacted by Baden’s father.

  About seventy miles to the east of Tartu lies Lake Peipus. The far shoreline was, and remains, Russia. The positioning of the border, through the lake and on either side of it, has not yet been formalised.

  A few years ago the two countries reached a border agreement. However, the Estonians insisted that the abuses of the Soviet occupation be acknowledged in the final document, Russia refused, and the precise border was never ratified.

  Between Tartu and the lake lie seventy miles of flat marshland and forest. Silver birch and pine trees. Not much else, bar the occasional homestead. No villages, virtually no roads.

  Somehow John Baden had made the journey from Tartu, because it was determined that he drowned in the lake and was therefore alive when he got there. He was found in the lee of some trees lying face down on a stony beach.

  His body was identified in Estonia by Emily King, and then again, when it was brought back to Scotland, by his parents. With the exception of the bloating caused by immersion in water for forty-eight hours, there were no marks on his face. Identification was not, Rosco writes, problematic.

  John Baden went missing, and then his body turned up at the side of a lake. The questions needing answers were how and why and when. Who was never thought to be an issue.

  * * *

  Late afternoon becomes early evening. The mist doesn’t lift, it just becomes consumed by the darkness. I turn my back on the papers and sit at the cabin window. Mary has served me well for my trip. A double bed, a desk, a small sofa, a stool to sit on by the window.

  How many people conduct their lives, watching the world go slowly by, looking at the sea, troubled by this peculiar feeling of dissatisfaction?

  Having turned the light off, so that I wasn’t just looking at my own grim reflection, the night engulfs the room. Outside there is nothing, any other shipping obscured by the mist.

  The light illuminates the dark. The dark conceals the mist. The mist conceals the light. In the end, nothing wins.

  5

  Dinner in the gourmet restaurant. Gourmet is not a word particularly applicable to the food, nor even the prices. It’s more aimed at the people who wouldn’t be put off by the name. If you don’t like the sound of a restaurant with gourmet in the title, they don’t want you in there in the first place.

  The place is quiet. Most people must be eating elsewhere. Or not eating at all. I haven’t encountered too many other passengers, but I’m not looking, and not exploring the boat, my world is a small triangle between my room, the outside deck and the café/restaurant area aimed at people who don’t like the word “gourmet”.

  Pike perch and sautéed potatoes for dinner, with some indeterminate green. Two glasses of Chilean Chenin Blanc. Crème brûlée. Cup of coffee.

  No conversation with the waitress. She’s polite, but I’m not in the mood for talking.

  I want to find the answer to the mystery of John Baden from the file, to arrive in Estonia with an idea and for it to be proved right. But the papers so far have failed to provide any inspiration. I have another night on this boat, a train journey across Sweden, then overnight on the Stockholm to Tallinn ferry to figure something out.

  I want it to happen. Not so that I walk in and instantly produce a stroke of genius to impress everyone. I don’t care what they think. I just want to do a good job, and the best way to do that is to be in control.

  Always best to control an investigation from the start, which is generally easier than you think. Most of the time you know where it’s going right from the off.

  So far, however, John Baden eludes me, and the idea of walking into a room and meeting the man on Monday, without any clear idea in my head of what’s going on here, is making me slightly nervous.

  Nervous isn’t the word. But there’s something there, lurking; niggling and uncomfortable.

  After dinner I go out on deck and lean on the railing for a while. There’s no one else out here. Staring down at the water, I find I don’t have the usual feeling of being drawn in. On the seventh deck, the dark water, flaked with white, is a hundred feet away.

  How long would you survive in the North Sea in the middle of November in a flat calm? Twenty minutes maybe, if you were healthy before it started.

  I go up a floor and halfway along to the stern, back to my cabin. Into the dark. Don’t turn on any lights, take my place at the window. The bed is clear of papers, as I’d tidied the file away before going for dinner. I won’t look at it again tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll grab a pastry and some coffee and come back here and have another couple of hours before we dock.

  The night passes by to the low drone of the engines. Eventually I tear myself away from the vacuum of the dark outside.

  * * *

  There’s no great stretch from the security services to the police. An easy jump to make, and the police are usually happy to take on people with the experience, although often enough the ego gets in the way. I don’t t
hink I ever had that problem, although I’ve heard of others who mistakenly thought the same, so what do I know?

  I was offered a job in London, but I wanted to go north. Had been thinking about Inverness or Aberdeen, but there was a post on offer in Dingwall, so I was happy to take it. Rosco’s dismissal, after years stuck in the same pay grade – his career going nowhere – had created a vacancy.

  My new colleagues were all wary at first, but eventually I began to fit in. Kept my head down, did a good job, the two core principles of being accepted into a new office. They probably thought I was going to be one of those burned-out screw-ups, taking what he could get. Sure, I’d had enough of war zones and getting caught up in fire-fights and spending weeks at a time waiting for the knife in the back, but there’s not too much of that in Dingwall. Right from the first day it was fine. No drama, no trauma.

  The drama came before I left. The drama with Olivia.

  When she found out I was going, she got hysterical. Not for the first time. This time though, it was in public, and she let vent her full fury for an audience. Outed me as a former member of the security services in the process, at least to fifteen people or so in the restaurant. I worried that someone was filming it, and that it would appear on YouTube within a few minutes, but I got some of the guys back at Vauxhall to check. They couldn’t find anything. None of the other diners had been inclined to be amused by Olivia’s shouting and my painful silence.

  It just wasn’t that kind of restaurant.

  Olivia was one of those people who hid behind the mask. You could never really tell what was going on. A majority of the time things were fine, but sometimes you just couldn’t understand what she was thinking. There would be no reason, or if there was, the reason didn’t seem to make any sense. Yet you couldn’t talk it through.

  Of course, I asked her if she wanted to come to the Highlands, but it was in the certain knowledge that she’d say no. Olivia was the kind of London girl who thinks the world north of Regent’s Park and west of Sloane Square is some tribal hinterland, where you’re lucky to find anyone who speaks English. You might as well be in central Afghanistan.

  And so, although she asked me not to go, I said I was leaving anyway. She fought me on it, just out of bloody mindedness – right up until the last time I drove my car away from her front door – standing in the street, shouting abuse at my rear window.

  6

  DI Rosco was in Estonia for ten days, and somehow things were never the same for him after he returned. The file implies that they welcomed his expertise. Perhaps he looked upon his time there as the halcyon days, the ones he would never get back, the ones that would always be better than what was to come.

  Not that his expertise actually got them anywhere.

  He and his Estonian colleagues interviewed over a hundred people, none of whom had been able to impart any useful information. No one had seen John Baden leave the hotel, so it was unknown whether his departure had been forced. There wasn’t a single sighting of him thereafter. The nearest dwelling to where his body washed up on shore was over five miles away, and naturally they had nothing to add to the investigation. Why would they have had? There are strong currents in the lake, and it was acknowledged that Baden’s body could have been dumped anywhere.

  Rosco worked on the basis that what had led to Baden’s death was in Estonia, and when he found nothing, finally he brought the investigation home.

  His colleagues had made inquiries in his absence, but there was nothing to report. It hadn’t been much of an investigation. There isn’t a police force in the country, even this far north, that has nothing better to do than chase after someone else’s case, and one that happened in another country at that.

  Rosco came home to a thin file, and had to build on it. He unearthed some strange characters from Baden’s time at university, and on that meagre premise, spent another few weeks chasing short leads going nowhere and interviewing people who’d known Baden for ten minutes in Aberdeen.

  Eventually the leads dried up and time ran out and he was moved on to something else.

  At some stage, back in Scotland – and I don’t intend to spend as long in Estonia as DI Rosco – I’ll need to speak to Baden’s mother – his father died several years ago – and hopefully to Emily King, if we can track her down.

  Nevertheless, the reading of the last of the papers in Rosco’s file prove unrewarding, and leave me no nearer the desired stroke of genius. That will have to wait.

  * * *

  The boat docks in Gothenburg, I disembark with my small red suitcase and find the bus for the train station. The weather is heavy and grim. The day will be even shorter than normal.

  The bus is full, a few people standing in the aisle. The windows are steamed up, obscuring the view of the city. Cars and cyclists and faces flash by, most people hidden beneath umbrellas and hats. The journey is short. Had I realised how close the train station was, I would have walked.

  I did a job in Stockholm a while ago. In and out, didn’t see much. Back in the days when I could get on a plane without breaking a sweat. I remember the patchwork of islands, but not a lot else.

  I had a meet arranged in the Vasamuseet, the most frequently visited museum in Scandinavia. The Vasa was a seventeenth-century Swedish warship designed by someone throwing cannons at a piece of paper. Top heavy with artillery, it sank a few hundred yards into its maiden voyage. I’d never heard of it before, which I was slightly embarrassed by at the time, but it stands as the supreme metaphor for political and military hubris and stupidity.

  One of those moments when I could have spent a lot longer in the museum reading about it, looking at the salvaged hull, but then I had my quick handover and I was heading back to the airport.

  I resolved, then, to read more about the Vasa, but never have done. I think about it again sitting on the train to Stockholm, but I won’t have the time to find the museum today. Passing through. Maybe on the way back.

  Mary continues to come through for me. There must be money in the budget they’re needing to spend, or else lose in the next financial year. A double bed on last night’s boat, and now a first class ticket on the train.

  I sit alone at a table for four, barely anyone else on the carriage. Sweden flashes by in a series of lakes and trees and glimpses of empty dual carriageways.

  7

  Another cabin, another window. The boat is moving slowly out of Sweden, past endless tree-covered islands, large and small. Dark already, however, even before we departed, the islands identified by the pale moonlight and the occasional solitary light outside a remote house.

  Summer homes, weekend homes, perhaps one occupied by a determined spirit who commutes into the city every day by boat. I see myself doing it, although of course I live in a three-bedroomed bungalow and drive less than ten minutes to the station every day, which isn’t particularly adventurous.

  There is a knock at the cabin door. Sitting in the dark, watching the evening go by, it comes as a shock. I shake it off, turn on the light and open the door, presuming some sort of cabin service, and that Mary really ought not to be spending so much of the budget on sending her officer to Estonia in this much style.

  A young man in a suit.

  ‘DI Westphall?’

  They’ve seen me coming.

  ‘Inspector Kuusk, Estonian police, Tallinn jurisdiction.’

  He holds out his hand and I take it.

  ‘Welcoming committee?’ I ask.

  ‘I was in Stockholm today anyway. I thought we could get the boat back together, talk things over before you turn up at the station tomorrow, so that I know everything you know and vice versa. We are going to work together, yes?’

  He looks about sixteen, which is disconcerting. And one learns not to take offers of help at face value.

  ‘You have I.D.?’

  ‘Of course. My apologies.’

  He hands over the card. It seems in order, but of course, we both know it could be anything. I’ve handed ov
er a hundred fake I.D. cards in my time.

  ‘Just give me a few minutes to get ready, and I’ll meet you downstairs in the coffee bar.’

  He smiles, takes back his card and I close the door.

  * * *

  I sit down opposite him with a cup of coffee and a glass of water.

  ‘Are you happy I should be here?’ he asks. He’s smiling.

  ‘You really just happened to be in Stockholm today? You got the boat over last night just to take the boat back tonight?’

  He’s drinking a latte, which is almost done. There is an A4-sized file tucked in beside the arm of the chair.

  ‘Some of us get on a plane, Detective Inspector. I flew in today, I had a meeting with some Nordic counterparts. Yes, normally I would have flown back, but it’s always nice to spend time on the boat. We can chat, we can go our separate ways, and by 2 a.m. there will be plenty of drunk young women. If you know what I mean.’

  ‘At least you’ll get something out of it,’ I say. Then, ‘You’re young.’

  ‘Twenty-nine,’ he says, seemingly unconcerned about my bluntness. I don’t mean, in any case, to imply that he’s too young to do his job. I’m just curious.

  ‘That’s pretty young.’

  ‘We’re a young country. We have the youngest Prime Minister in Europe. We have more vigour, more determination to get things done.’

  ‘Not so much experience.’

  ‘We listen to the old and take their advice. But we have the spark to follow through where the older generation will hold back and be more cautious.’

  I suddenly wonder if I’m going to find people offering me a seat on the bus, and expecting me to be sage, interesting but largely inactive.

  ‘Am I past it at forty-one?’

  He smiles.

  ‘The coffee on this boat is good,’ he says, side-swerving the issue of my advanced years. ‘That’s another reason to be here.’

  ‘You’ve met this person claiming to be John Baden?’