DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  Hand across his chin, your classic detective's pose.

  'Suppose it's not that unusual a phrase. A decent thought, but in tying them together we have Cartwright's admission in any case. Anyway, the superintendent watched the interview. Or, at least, enough of it to be convinced. When Mr Cartwright was not immediately able to provide an alibi for any of the four murders, the super seemed to find this compelling.'

  'Ah, so we have at least coincidence on our side.'

  He nods, smiles ruefully. 'Now we're at the case-building stage, and we're full-on with that.'

  'Oh, Cartwright did tell me that he'd had nothing to do with Maureen, had never replied to her letters, no contact ever.'

  'Always good to catch them in a lie,' says Taylor. 'And it does explain why she stopped writing to him.'

  Nod in agreement, decide to ask the question that I probably ought not to.

  'You speak to Tony Stewart?'

  Shadow across his face, lowers his head slightly. It's all right to feel slightly upbeat about making a false arrest, especially when it's your boss who's making a dick of himself, but it's a tough copper who's chipper about anyone finding out their wife has had her head spiked.

  'Aye. Poor bastard. Hadn't been able to get in touch with her for about twenty-four hours before he got on the plane, so he was shitting himself anyway. We got someone to meet him off the plane at Heathrow. He went to pieces down there. Met him at this end as well, and he was still in pieces.'

  Nothing to say. I was right, I shouldn't have asked the question in the first place. Don't want to think about some guy whose wife I slept with being in pieces. Don't want to think about the fact that he wouldn't have been able to get in touch with her for some of that twenty-four hours because she was in bed with me.

  I'm not in pieces. I'm not. But that's a bucketload of denial keeping me together.

  'I take it you're responsible for some of that time he couldn't get hold of her?'

  A moment, then I nod. He exhales a long breath. Checks his watch.

  'We'll talk again in the morning. It's not out of the question that you'll be temporarily suspended pending further investigation, but at the best, I'll need to remove you from this investigation.'

  'Of course.'

  Been a while since I managed to see a big investigation all the way through to the end.

  'How'd you get on up north?'

  'I could have stayed,' I say. I could too. I could move up there and clean toilets.

  Hey, if I'm kicked off this case, then I can at least go back to the toilet guy. Maybe helping him will give me some level of job satisfaction akin to what he manages to achieve.

  'I bet. You talk to the minister?'

  'Aye. A decent old sort, out walking his dog, worried about his piles sitting on a wooden bench. Didn't have a lot to say, except surprise that it was happening now and not previously. In fact...' Pause to think about the old fellow, and the nuance of his words. Nuance? I don't think so. I think he was quite straightforward. 'No, he was pretty clear. Said it was extremely nasty before, and that he wouldn't have been surprised if there had been murder back then. That it's happening now surprised him. So he wondered if the merger ultimately might be a red herring. Not, obviously, an intentional red herring, but something that's distracting us from the case.'

  'Possible,' he says. Another check of the watch, then he waves his hand towards the door.

  'You should go home. Write up your interview with the minister in the morning, ping it over. I'll tell Ramsay just to get you back onto the usual thing. We'll talk when I get the time.'

  Nothing else to say. The situation does not allow that I let the conversation turn to anything else. He's being unusually polite about it, but the bottom line is I'm getting my due.

  Kicked off the case, with the not entirely outside possibility of being kicked out of the police.

  NEVERTHELESS, I DON't leave work just yet. The thought of going home is too awful. Just too awful. She'll still be there, sitting at the small dining table, smiling at me as I walk in the door.

  It didn't go so well when I went home last night, after all.

  Find the girl, that's what Reverend Baxter said. So I go down to records, make myself known to the woman on duty – who just so happens to be Cheryl, with whom I had the brief fling until our passion crashed and burned on the unsavoury matter of anal sex – we exchange barely a word, and I find a computer to sit at.

  I could do the first part of it, checking back over missing persons from the last few years, at my desk, but Taylor doesn't want me there, which is fine. I just need to hope that I don't walk into him on the way out. He'll likely be working much later, so I'll give it half an hour or an hour and then head off.

  Sit for a moment staring at a blank screen. Haven't been thinking of the reality of this until now. Searching for missing or dead children is awful. There's a lot of shit in this job, but Jesus, this is right there at the top. Out in front. The shittiest thing any of us ever has to do. So, here I am, voluntarily giving myself the task of searching through one tragic story after another.

  And what is it I'm hoping to find? Who, or what, is this strange little girl who keeps speaking to me?

  My thoughts are too prosaic for that. Can't think about it. I just know that what Baxter said makes sense. I need to find the girl, and this is as good a place to start looking as any.

  39

  An hour, all I could stand. Such an overwhelming feeling of sadness. So many lives lost or ruined.

  Out the station, do my best to shove everything that I've just read into the necessary compartment. No sign of my girl, whoever she is. If she went missing in the last few years, it wasn't from around here. Or, indeed, anywhere in Strathclyde.

  I don't go home. I get in the car, start to head in that direction, but then I see Philo sitting at the table, and I smell her scent on the sheets on the bed, and I can't go there. I just can't. Yes, I need to face this grief at some point. Everybody has to face grief. But I need to be in a better place before it happens.

  Where do I end up? In the car park at Morrison's down by the river. Somewhere to sit and think. It'd be good to have someone to talk to. Perhaps I shouldn't have left the station so quickly, because that's the only place I'm going to find anyone. But then who would it be? My new pal, Eileen? Someone I've known and more or less ignored for the last six or seven years.

  I contemplate, seriously, going to see Peggy. Turning up on my ex-wife's door, needing to talk. She'd love that. Might actually let me in, as I don't think she has anyone else on the go at the moment. But what then? What would I say? Hey, Peg, you know how for all those years I was keeping some dark secret that I just never got close enough to you to tell you? Well, I found someone I could confide in, someone I'd only known a few days, but who I quickly realised I loved more than I ever loved you. But now she's dead. You got a couple of hours to chat?

  I think of Margaret Christie, my doctor from three nights ago. Just three nights. What do you think? My last ever casual shag? That's what it feels like at the moment. She was staying at the Premier Inn at the Black Bear. Wonder if she's still up here. I could probably talk to her. But then, if I called her, she's going to think I'm looking for something more than conversation, and I won't be.

  I end up driving to the Black Bear anyway. Sitting in the bar. Watching Sky Sports. Eating a gammon steak and pineapple, drinking two glasses of wine. She's not in the bar. Why should she be?

  I should go home, but I can't. It's as though there's a wall up. I walk next door to the Premier Inn and book myself a room. Pay for a toothbrush and toothpaste.

  Go to the room, turn on the news. Brain in neutral. I'm here now. I can stop thinking about going home.

  The news leads with our story beneath the wonderful graphic: Bible Paul? Watch the media scrum in front of the station. A press conference in which Connor, unusually, takes the lead. Obviously wanting to be the face of the arrest. Nice for him, his brief moment in the sun. Possibly
doesn't understand that no one ever remembers the police officer on these occasions. They watch the news item, the basic facts of the case might stick with the viewer, but all they will have seen is the uniform. No one remembers the face of the officer.

  Fuck, I don't know him. Perhaps he fully understands that, but it's not about public perception for him. It's about positioning himself so that he looks good in front of his superiors, attempting to regain some of the reputation that he will think he lost during the Plague of Crows debacle. He must be confident, because he's going to look like a total cock if he's wrong.

  And I think we all know he's wrong.

  After the news I find a documentary on Egyptian treasures on BBC4, which I manage to watch in its entirety without falling asleep, as some young academic chap strides around ancient monuments in his pale blue shirt, talking excitedly to the camera.

  Where do they get these people? What is the genesis of these random three-part series that crop up continuously on BBC4? Do people sit around in an office and come up with titles for new shows, such as What The Ancient Greeks Taught Us or Who The Fuck Were The Phoenicians? or How Many Visigoths Did It Take To Change a Light Bulb? after which they put the idea out to tender? Or do academics like this guy sit in the bath and think up a show such as The Mongols Invented Golf And Other Astonishing Facts Of The Ancient World and then take it to the BBC?

  If it's the latter, I could do that. It'd give me something to do when I leave the police. Make a documentary for BBC4.

  My imagination wanders, Mitty-esque, as I watch the show. I struggle to think what it is that I'd have the expertise to discuss other than Dylan, Thistle and my own fucked-up life. Decide on a TV series entitled Echoes Of Dylan, From Firhill to Mesopotamia, and then the show is over and I take myself off to bed.

  I lie there, trying not to think about Philo Stewart, painfully thinking about her in my attempts not to.

  I think about her husband, the guy in a suit, in tears. The guy I had cuckolded the night before. He hadn't heard from her for twenty-four hours before he returned. Some of it he was on the plane, some of it she was in bed with me, making love, sleeping. We ate dinner the night before, breakfast the following morning. But it doesn't all add up to twenty-four hours.

  Why didn't she text him when she got home from my house? And now, thinking about it, I realise of course, that I have no idea when she left my house. Why have I only just thought of that? Because you were trying not to think about it at all.

  She would have had no reason to linger, so I don't suppose that she did. Why did she not call, or at least text her husband when she got back home? It would have been mid-afternoon with him. He must have been texting, calling. Maybe beginning to pull his hair out.

  The sorrow floods in with the thought that she couldn't bring herself to do it, because she knew. She knew she'd found someone else, and that the someone else was going to bring an end to her marriage.

  How much conceit is there in that thought? It doesn't matter. It's there, it's in my head, it won't leave.

  The thought that I could have had someone. Someone to really talk to, someone who understood, someone with whom the sex was unbelievable, someone with whom I could share. Someone to whom, at last, I could actually give something of myself.

  The inevitable tears on my pillow. Fuck. I don't move. I don't get up to get something with which to drown out the pain. Eventually the tiredness takes over and I fall asleep.

  'I'M PURE LIKE THAT, by the way, she can go and take a fuck tae hersel', so she can.'

  10.23 a.m. Head has been swirling since just after six. Woke up with the image of Philo sitting in that chair, in my head. Her face streaked with blood, her head pierced with spikes. Eyes open.

  Yes, great romance has to be doomed. If it's not, you end up sitting together watching TV. For the romance to last, there has to be separation and pain. No greater separation than one of you being dead.

  If this was Shakespeare – you know, one of those Shakespearean police procedurals you get in school – I'd find out who killed her and then drink poison. At the moment I'm shaping up to do neither, although I'm trying to distract myself from doomed love by thinking about the former, and can never rule out the latter.

  What I should be distracting myself with is the small domestic matter with which I'm currently dealing. A neighbourhood dispute in the new houses beyond the park. You're not usually going to get a detective sergeant packed off to one of these – not even a washed-up bum of a detective sergeant – but this one has been escalating.

  Started off with the age-old she's parking her car in front of my house complaint. We get fifty of them a day. They don't usually get as far as the shit through the letterbox, anonymous death threats and a whole host of other tit-for-tat, petty-tending-to-serious shit that I get bored thinking about.

  'Are you not embarrassed that I'm here?' I say. She wasn't expecting that. Big woman. I mean, round big, as opposed to tall big. Rough. I don't mind saying it. She's rough. Probably used to getting her own way around here. That appears to have changed when her physical and intellectual equal moved in next door.

  'Wha'?'

  She looks as if she's about to lamp me. I can handle her. Or, at least, I'd be able to run faster than her, and PC Wallace, who's standing by the door, can deal with her.

  'We're pretty stretched at the moment,' I say. 'There's a quadruple murder investigation in town. We currently have four missing persons on our books, as well as the usual dreadful crimes of child abuse and child pornography and child neglect. You're keeping me from helping those children, all because you can't speak to your neighbour. You can't compromise. You can't be bothered making the effort to come to some accommodation. Instead, you need an adult in uniform to sort it out for you.'

  'Are you finished?' she says, not picking up on the fact that I'm not in uniform.

  We all have to be so nice to people these days. Jesus, it sucks. Why can't you just tell people how it is, without having some do-gooding dickhead of a police lawyer up your arse?

  Obviously, this morning, I'm not in the mood to care.

  'As police we can't really do anything, and I mean, something in the region of nicking one of you and thus separating you—'

  'You're no' fuckin' nickin' me!'

  '—until one of you commits a serious crime. So, either one of you is going to have to kill or seriously kick fuck out of the other one, or burn the other's house down, or whatever. Then the one doing the kicking'll get nicked, and the other one's in hospital. If that's what you want... However, if you want to be pragmatic, then you're just going to have to tuck your balls back in and compromise. You're going to have to ignore the occasional car parking, she's going to have to try to park there less frequently, and you're both going to have to ignore the shitstorm of trivial revenge you've been cooking up for the last two months.'

  'Are you for real?'

  'Yes,' I say, getting to my feet. 'I'm going to go next door and say the same thing to Mrs Walker, at the end of which I'm telling her that you've invited her in for a cup of tea. So get the kettle on...'

  'She's no' fuckin' comin' in here!'

  'Up to you.'

  I pause for a moment before walking out. She stares at me like I'm some new species of arsehole. Time for a last few words of candour.

  'Mrs McLean, I'll be honest. You people, you know,' and I cast a hand around to indicate her type who live in this small housing estate, and it's just as well I don't sound like I went to Eton or Fettes, because then there would be absolutely no doubt that I mean what it sounds like, although at the moment she might just have enough confusion to let me out the door without swinging for me, 'you can't just forfeit personal responsibility and community responsibility, so that every time a problem comes along you ask someone else to solve it for you.'

  'Can I no'? You think I give a fuck what some polis says?'

  'You think, just because of my badge, I give a fuck about you and your neighbour squabbling like kids? S
ort it out between yourselves, or come back to me when one of you's in hospital. I'm going next door.'

  Look at Wallace, nod in the direction of the door.

  She throws a 'fuck off!' at our backs as we walk out.

  Down the short path, through the gate. Stand on the pavement, looking across at the trees of the park. Hands in pockets. Don't really feel like going next door and delivering the same pointless message, but pretty much have to now.

  'What'd you think?' I ask.

  'Sir?'

  'What'd you think? Of me telling her she had to take responsibility for her own actions?'

  'Thought it was well-judged,' says Wallace.

  'Did you really?'

  'Yes, sir. If it was obvious one-way harassment then it would have been inappropriate, but since it's apparent that both sides are as bad as each other...'

  'Hmm.'

  I'll take that. A bit of brown-nosing from a constable. As if that's going to get him anywhere.

  I look at the next house, the frames of the door and the windows peeling blue paint, a tricycle lying forlornly on its side by the front path.

  'Word of warning, sir,' says Wallace, as I open the gate.

  'Go on.'

  'Mrs Walker makes Mrs McLean look like Donkey from Shrek.'

  40

  I let Wallace drive back to the station on his own, while I walk through the park.

  I wonder how long I can keep that up. Moving from complaint to complaint, telling people they need to sort out their own problems. Chances are that by the time I get back to the station either Mrs Walker or Mrs McLean will be dead, and whichever one is still alive will be able to say that I more or less encouraged her.

  Cold, damp day, bit of a chill wind. Not a good one for walking. Cut down to the path at the lower end of the football pitches rather than taking the longer high road, the path round the top end of the gully. I know where I'm going. Back to the church. Not part of the investigation any more, so what exactly is it that I'm doing?