DS Hutton Box Set

by Douglas Lindsay

  ‘Big houses up there,’ I say. ‘What do they do?’

  He snorts.

  ‘I doubt she’s ever done anything. He was at RBS. They made him redundant, and he walked away with one point three million.’ He articulates the figure like he might be getting lip read, enhanced mouth movement/lower volume combination. This guy really is a twat. Still, here now. All in.

  ‘Show me the photograph,’ I say.

  ‘There’s more than one.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  He turns on the tablet, tips it up so I can’t see him type in the pass code – which is fair enough, because obviously being a police officer I’m this close from reaching over there, grabbing the thing the fuck off him and never giving it back – has to concentrate while he works out how to retrieve a photograph, and then turns the tablet round, making sure to hold on to the device.

  ‘See?’ he says.

  There, right enough, is a picture of a woman, her breasts squashed against the window. Her face is squashed too, although the look of pleasure is still apparent. The man behind is not in shot, but for a single hand holding her stomach. A large lady in her fifties, a mass of curly hair, dyed auburn.

  I study it, noting the high quality of the double glazing – if these were 1930s windows, that woman would be going for a Burton, shards of shattered glass embedded in those large, compressed boobs – before looking up at him.

  ‘That’s some pretty graphic evidence,’ I say. ‘When was it taken?’

  ‘Oh, that was the third time.’

  ‘The third?’

  ‘These people aren’t messing around, Sergeant.’

  ‘And do you have photos from the first two?’

  Pursed lips.

  ‘The first time, well to be honest, I was shocked. And I wouldn’t have dreamt of taking a picture. I thought they must just have got carried away. But then, sure enough, a few days later, they did it again. Right there, up at the window opposite where I sit and do my jigsaw puzzles.’

  He does jigsaw puzzles. Oh well, they can be fun. Or something. Meditative. That’s the word. Not fun. Maybe it would help me if I did jigsaw puzzles.

  ‘What kid of jigsaw puzzles do you do?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you do those, you know, five thousand piece things, or...’

  ‘Oh, usually fifteen hundred. Anything else is too... Wait. What does that have to do with it? Are you mocking me?’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Gregson. Sorry, so you took the picture the third time?’

  He looks suspicious, and then says, ‘Yes.’

  ‘And this was in the last couple of days?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, this was three weeks ago.’ His eyes have widened. ‘The other pictures, they’re from other times. I have a lot of pictures.’

  ‘How many times have they had sex in the window, Mr Gregson?’

  The lips tighten a little again, the way one’s sphincter does any time a doctor mentions the word suppository.

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘And why has it taken you so long to come to speak to us?’

  He leans forward on the desk.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. Mr Hartwell and I, you know, we’re on the Bowling Club committee together. We all know each other. I’ve eaten Mrs Hartwell’s cake.’

  Keep a straight face now, Sergeant, none of your sniggering. This isn’t a Carry On movie.

  ‘Have you seen them socially since the window sex began?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And...?’

  ‘Nothing was said,’ he says primly.

  ‘So, why d’you think they’re intentionally letting you watch them have sex?’

  He looks back at the picture of the woman, and then turns the tablet back to me. He starts slowly dragging his finger across the screen, flicking from image to image. Mrs Hartwell pressed against the window. Mr Hartwell side on, his wife on her knees fellating him. Mrs Hartwell sitting on her husband’s face. Mrs Hartwell, seemingly with her legs between her husband’s armpits, her head resting on the ground, as he fucks her. There’s the clincher. I don’t get a really good look at it, but it’s the kind of position you only do for show. Can’t possibly be comfortable for either of them.

  There are a lot of pictures. He keeps going, flicking through. It’s probably up to me to stop him.

  ‘Wow, you got an ejaculation shot. Nice timing.’

  He presses the off button, and brings the tablet fully back under his control, looking uncomfortable.

  ‘You want me to go and speak to them?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘OK, I can do that. Don’t you think... they must have seen you taking the photographs, though, right, especially if you were taking it on that thing? It’s hardly discreet.’

  ‘Yes, of course they saw. They clearly loved it. Look at the pair of them. They’re like rabbits.’

  ‘Perhaps they were thinking you were enjoying it. You took all...’

  ‘Good God!’

  ‘Have you asked them to stop? Have you, for example, drawn a curtain so you can’t see them?’

  ‘It’s summer. I don’t draw the curtains until after ten.’

  ‘All right... Why do you think they’re doing it, then?’

  ‘Clearly they want me to join in. But I’m not going to. They can’t have me.’

  Time for coffee. I push the chair back, stand up. Despite the fact the woman in the photograph is so unattractive she could have played one of the dwarf women you never actually get to see in Lord Of The Rings, there was a time when I would have been turned on looking at those pictures. Not any more. Well, not at the moment.

  ‘Thanks for coming in, Mr Gregson. I’ll go and see them and report back, and we’ll see where it’s going to go.’

  He doesn’t look convinced. Perhaps if I’d said I’d go round there with a SWAT team.

  2

  Clayton lies on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. The psychiatrist sits three yards away. She holds a notepad, and a small pencil, the kind golfers use to mark a scorecard. She seems uncomfortable, but Clayton is oblivious.

  ‘You wanted to talk about school,’ she says.

  Clayton taps the ends of his fingers together.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I did, didn’t I? And you’re absolutely right, because where else does it all start? One wastes so many years of one’s life in those God-awful institutions. And they wonder why we’re so messed up. Why we need help.’

  ‘Most people don’t need help when they leave school. Not psychiatric help, anyway.’

  He snorts, closes his eyes.

  ‘What was so different about you?’

  He makes a theatrical hand gesture, tossing her words across the room.

  ‘There’s no point in doing this if you’re not going to talk to me,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he says, his voice mellower than she’d been expecting.

  She watches him, he does not look at her. His eyes are closed, she knows from experience with others that he is reliving a moment, finding the words, wondering whether or not to tell her the story. The less she says now, the more likely he’ll eventually talk. She wouldn’t be here, after all, if he wasn’t going to.

  ‘All right, all right, of course,’ he says. ‘Of course.’

  He clasps his hands, his fingers rhythmic, constant small movements, and nods to himself again.

  ‘There were three things. I was quiet, of course. Didn’t have many friends. Wasn’t bullied much, although I was soft. Too soft. But they didn’t realise. I think... yes, I think they were scared of me. Because I was quiet, and I watched. One day in music the teacher asked who could play the piano.’

  He seems embarrassed by the memory.

  ‘There was silence for a while, and so I put my hand up. I don’t know why I did that. I was fourteen. I played Jesu. Much too slowly, and several mistakes later, I retreated. And then, suddenly, Adam Pearson walks to the front o
f the class, looking shy. Shy. As if. Played the piano like, I don’t know, some 1940s bluesman. Jesus. Looking back... he owned the room. Magnificent playing. Truly magnificent.’

  ‘Surely it needn’t have impacted on you,’ she said. ‘Your classmates must just have, I don’t know, ignored you. And it soun...’

  ‘They were laughing. Not out loud, but they were laughing.’

  Fingers are tensing, getting annoyed. She knows the signs. Now he’s started, he won’t stop.

  ‘So, then fucking Pearson, or someone, I don’t know who, gets Gillian Thompson to come up and speak to me in the common room. Asked me what book I was reading, as though –’

  ‘What book were you reading?’

  ‘What?’

  He turns and looks at her, his brow furrowed at the interruption.

  ‘What book were you reading?’

  ‘The Shining. What difference does it make?’

  She shakes her head, indicates for him to go on.

  ‘I barely spoke to her. Just showed her the book. She goes back to her friends and they start laughing. I mean, what was she doing, talking to me? Gillian Thompson? Seriously? She was taking the piss.’

  ‘Who was Gillian Thompson?’

  ‘The class bike. She was pretty, mind. Pretty. No business talking to the likes of me.’

  ‘And the third thing?’ she asks.

  Classic case, she thinks. Such trivial grievances. So often the way.

  ‘I asked her out. I thought about it, I thought about why she came to speak to me, and I asked her out. She said no. And then Pearson, who I’d hardly, I don’t know, hardly noticed before then, he laughs at me. He tells everyone. They’re looking at me, this overweight, unattractive nerd, with his Stephen King novels, and buried in his algebra books. They were laughing at me. It was him. Pearson. I knew it was. It was like... when he played the piano in class, he wanted some dweeb to get up there first, somebody rubbish, so he would look even better against them. I mean, it wasn’t like he needed it. He was good enough.’

  He stares straight ahead. His eyes are looking at a picture on the wall in front of him. A pale wall, the picture a still life, fruit in a bowl, a brace of partridge on a kitchen table.

  ‘Pity,’ he says.

  She waits for him to continue, but at the same time knows he’s come to a natural break in the narrative.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What’s a pity?’

  ‘That he died, of course,’ says Clayton.

  A beat.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she forces herself to ask.

  Clayton smiles, waves one of his dismissive hands, catches her eye for the first time in a while, and then rests his head back on the settee.

  ‘He lived up near the school, the house backed onto some old fields. The fields are a housing estate now, of course. There were trees on the other side of the field, a nice wood. I think it’s still there. Had a lovely feel to it. A small stream. Probably full of used needles and condoms these days, but it was decent back then.

  ‘I watched him for a while. Adam Pearson. I hid in the woods and watched him. It was the following school year, perfect time. Late September. The nights were getting shorter, but the leaves were hanging onto the trees, and there was plenty of cover in there. I could see his bedroom window. He would have the curtains open, the light on. Played guitar, did his homework, listened to music. So fucking normal.

  ‘When he’d been in town, he’d often come home across the field at the back...’

  He lets the words drift away. Taking himself back. She swallows. Strangely, despite everything, she hadn’t actually seen this coming. What story had she thought he was going to tell from his childhood?

  ‘I honestly... honestly didn’t think I was ever going to kill him. That wasn’t what this was about. I was going to break his fingers. That was all. Break his stupid, long, thin, fucking, piano-playing fingers.

  ‘Came up behind him in the dark. Oh, I was nervous, nervous all right. Shitting myself. Had a brick in my hand. Shitting myself he was going to turn round, but it was raining and windy. The trees were moving. Perfect cover. In my dreams I’d imagined taking a movie moment. You know, pausing just behind him, saying, ‘Adam?’ and seeing the look on his poor, pathetic little face when he turned round, just before I fucked him over the forehead with the brick. But I admit it! I’m no film star! No hero! I chickened out, and hit him over the back of the head.

  ‘He fell. I hit him again to be sure, and then dragged him by the legs into the woods. He’d had his hood up, and for a second I thought how wonderfully funny it would have been if it hadn’t been Adam. If I had just skulled some poor innocent passer-by!’

  He laughs, shaking his head in amusement, and then the laughter dies, and he stares melancholically back at the picture of the dead partridges.

  ‘But no, it was Adam, poor Adam right enough. And so I did what I set out to do. I broke his fingers. I thought they would snap easily, you know, just bending them back.’

  He turns and gives her a curious stare, not quite understanding. She swallows again. Feels the hair standing on her arms.

  ‘I couldn’t even do that. I was pathetic. Oh, I think I managed one little finger. Just one. So, I attacked them with the brick instead. And... well, that’s all. That was how it happened. Maybe if I’d been able to break his fingers easily, I could have done it and left it there. But I got carried away. Started hitting his fingers with the brick, and then one time I missed his hand, it was up here, you know, his arm bent so it was up by his shoulder, and I hit his face, his stupid, pretty fucking face, and he flinched and I thought, shit, he’s going to wake up. So I switched from his hands to his face and head.

  ‘I don’t mind admitting I was crying. Quite upset by the whole sad affair. Some would think it was me who should be pitied. And there I was. Couldn’t stop. I kept hitting him in the head with the brick...’

  His voice drifts off again, as if swallowed up in sorrowful remembrance. The tone, she thinks, would not have been unlike someone describing the last time they saw their father alive. A lament to a lost time.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘he never did wake up.’

  With those words, the memory is snapped, he frees himself from it and says, ‘Ha!’

  Clasps his hands together again.

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Didn’t the police come to the school?’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Did they interview you?’

  ‘They interviewed everyone. I was just another kid, just another quiet kid, who sat at the back of the class and didn’t really have any friends, and didn’t say much. No one noticed me.’

  ‘You thought a minute ago everyone was laughing at you.’

  His eyes rest on her, his face impassive. The look that goes right through her. The look that explains why he’s sitting there, now, in front of her, and she’s got a notebook in her hands. The look that chills her right down into the pit of her soul.

  ‘I think we’re done for the day,’ he says.

  3

  Standing at the window in Taylor’s room, waiting for him to get off the phone. He’s speaking to Connor, who’s spending the day through in Edinburgh discussing budget cuts. And when I say discussing, he’ll be getting told the score. The title of the lecture by the Chief Constable of Police Scotland is “How Bad It Is, And By How Much Are You All Just About To Be Fucked”. Or something. They’ll be drawing lots to see who’s out of a job by the time they get to the door of the lecture room.

  Connor said before he left he’d been told his job is safe, so we don’t even have that little piece of hope. All we can cling to is that someone was lying to him because he’s a dick.

  Taylor isn’t saying much, so I’ve tuned out. Looking out at the day, a warm late morning in June. I can see two of our lot standing outside having a fag. There’s a young couple across the road on the way to the pub. They are familiar to us, which is why I know they�
�re on the way to the pub. As time goes by, we will play a bigger and bigger part in their lives. Not that it’s usually detective work. There’s never much detecting to do with the likes of them.

  Taylor hangs up. I don’t immediately turn round. There’s an attractiveness about the day. The sort of day that makes you want to be up a mountain, or by a river. Or both. A packed lunch, a cool drink. Peanuts. Maybe a flask of tea for later.

  ‘What’s so interesting?’

  I turn, dragged away from my passing daydream.

  ‘What’s the news?’ I ask.

  ‘They haven’t really got started yet,’ says Taylor. ‘They’ve had the introductory speeches, then they had a break. The superintendent felt the need to check in during his spare twenty minutes, for which I’m grateful, because obviously we’ve all been running around like headless Muppets in his absence, waiting for some direction.’

  ‘Perhaps he was doing it to demonstrate to all the other knobs how vital he is to the station.’

  Taylor stares with some resignation at the floor.

  ‘Probably bang on.’

  He looks up. He’s tired. Everybody’s tired.

  ‘You were late,’ he says. ‘Again.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I say.

  ‘If it’s alcohol –’

  ‘Just not sleeping. Lying in bed, a total basketcase. This morning I turned my alarm off because I was wide awake, but made the rookie error of not getting out of bed when I did it.’

  ‘At least you picked the morning the boss was in Edinburgh, but, you know –’

  Hold my hand up.

  ‘I’m on it. Two alarms tomorrow, one on the other side of the room.’

  ‘Anyway, I want you to realise I gave you the guy with the photographs as punishment. And you’re going to follow it to the death.’

  Well, that serves me right.

  ‘Have you been round to talk to the happy couple yet?’

  ‘Just about to,’ I say. ‘My original plan was to come up here and try to get out of it, but I see now...’