He looks round at her, turns quickly away. Useless bitch, he thinks.
‘Just the neck, just at the part that was inside his mouth. Lucky, really. Meant I didn’t get cut, which was the main thing. So I lurched forward, of course, lost my balance a little bit, and the broken neck stabs into the back of his mouth. Oof! Messy. God he was thrashing now. Like a wild pig! It was hilarious, it really was. I thought, what are you doing? Settle the fuck down!’
He sighs heavily, suddenly bored with the story, mimicking the fact this was the point in the narrative when he had decided enough was enough.
‘Well, I had to bring it to an end then, of course. He was becoming tiresome, and I couldn’t risk him catching me with, I don’t know, a stray blow. So I got off him and stood on his throat. I had control, you see. Stood on his throat. Got blood on my boots.’
He rolls his eyes at the inconvenience.
‘Didn’t take long. Then, I don’t know, well he was dead, and I decided to enjoy myself. Stripped him naked...’
He pauses, has come to a part of the story he doesn’t seem to enjoy so much.
‘Didn’t really know what I was doing,’ he says eventually. ‘No plan. You should always plan. I cut off his penis with a shard of glass. Sheesh. Don’t know why I did that. Traced some random stuff on his stomach. Then I turned him over and made a pentagram on his back. I mean, what the fuck? Jesus, I didn’t even know if it was a proper pentagram. Then I thought I’d insert the neck of the bottle into his anus... well, why not...? but, you know, I think I might have needed some lube to do it properly, and I was thinking, ugh, lube... Rather a half-hearted effort, so I left it there. Quite enough for one night.’
He turns, gives her another glance, then looks away again, back to the Five Orange Pips, clearly unimpressed with her performance.
‘Stopped at Tesco on the way home and bought some Chardonnay. Had a taste for it that evening. And pizza. I bought a pizza, although I think I only ate half of it in the end.’
18
Taylor finds me across the road, on my own, drinking coffee. Stepped out of the office for half an hour. Half my morning on the railway station murder – proceeding like a slow-moving train, arriving late at every place it stops – and half on the other endless stream of crap that crosses the desk of every detective sergeant in the country.
Another aggravated assault? It’s all yours, sunshine.
Sitting at a table on my own, stooped over a long-since finished flat white, shoulders hunched, terrible posture. Straighten up as Taylor enters, and he stops beside me.
‘You want another?’ he asks.
‘I should be getting back.’
‘It’s all right. You want another?’
‘Yeah, sure. Flat white. And one of those long chocolate croissant things.’
He gives me a look, then turns to the counter.
So it’s back. My desire. My desire is back. And the thoughts that go with it. And the depression that goes with it too.
There are two women at a table by the window. They haven’t noticed me at all, which is something. One of them... nah. There’s nothing about her. Nothing to look at, nothing to get interested in. Nothing. She’s someone’s mum, and she gave up a long time ago. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I imagine she’s sitting there talking about the kids and the school and the TV and the garden and what the fuck Peter is really doing when he says he’s working late for the third time this week and where the fuck they’re going on holiday.
Her friend is a different kettle of potatoes. It doesn’t matter what she looks like. There’s a light about her. An openness. She’s not saying much, but when she speaks, the words will be more optimistic. She won’t just talk about the average goings-on of an average day, the kids and the supermarket and the school gate politics, and if she does, her perspective will be completely different.
I like her. She doesn’t even know it, and she wouldn’t be interested in me even if she did. And already I’ve undressed her and, like my good friends the Hartwells, I’ve fucked her up against the window.
Shit. I was supposed to follow up on the Hartwell crap. Something else that’s fallen through the cracks. Shouldn’t mention cracks, not in relation to Mrs Hartwell at any rate.
Taylor places the coffee and pastry on the table for me, then goes back to get his own. Sits down, looks out of the window.
‘Contemplating the end of your football management dream?’ asks Taylor after a few seconds.
‘Something like that,’ I say.
Take some coffee, continue to follow Taylor’s gaze out of the window. Slow day up this end of Cambuslang. Cars go by. A few pedestrians.
‘How are you getting on pulling the three murder investigations together?’ I ask.
His mouth full of chocolate croissant, he answers with a roll of his eyes. Dabs at his lips with the napkin.
‘I mentioned it to Connor. Off the scale disinterest. Didn’t tell me not to pursue it, but thought little of it and didn’t care either way.’
‘You can always count on him to care about completely the wrong things,’ I say.
‘Yes. Spoke to DCI Taylor in Springburn, the one from yesterday. He seemed interested. We compared notes. Didn’t really get anywhere, but it’s a start.’
‘He’s also called Taylor?’
‘Yeah, I know, total mind fuck,’ he says dryly. ‘Then I spoke to DCI Waterbridge, who’s leading the investigation into the double beheading. The one everyone’s talking about. The poster child of this week’s murders.’
‘And he didn’t want you anywhere near it?’
‘Damn right. It’s his investigation. It’s a racially-motivated crime, and it very, very, very – and he really did use the word three times – clearly has nothing to do with either of our so-called murder investigations.’
‘He said ‘so-called’?’
‘Yes.’
‘What a dick.’
‘Yes.’
Taylor takes another bite of his croissant, still looking out of the window.
‘So, that’s that for now. It was always a slim hope, and really the best chance of success was putting all three together and seeing if it got us somewhere.’
‘Maybe there’s nowhere to get.’
‘Probably not.’
‘Three days and we come to the desperately-clutching-at-straws part of the investigation.’
He laughs without any amusement.
‘We started doing that long before now.’
We watch the day go by. Two middle-aged bastards sitting in a sad outpost of Glasgow, looking out on a grey summer’s early afternoon. This is it. This is the real end of policing.
‘She looks like your type,’ says Taylor, voice low, indicating the woman at the window.
The fact he knows me this well depresses me still further and I don’t reply. My chocolate croissant comes to an end, leaving, for the moment, a satisfying aftertaste.
‘D’you mind if I give Tandy Kramer’s father a call and speak to him?’ I say.
‘Might as well. Get another perspective. Maybe you’ll have a nose for something. Anything from MacGregor?’
‘Top of the list when I get back.’
‘Right.’
Another drink of coffee, another couple of minutes pass, leading towards the end of the day. Time stagnates.
‘Try to get an answer from MacGregor before you speak to Kramer,’ says Taylor, bringing the latest melancholic silence to an end. ‘One of the reasons we started getting suspicious about Kramer was because of the e-mail you received. If it turns out... if it didn’t come from California, I don’t know if we have any reason to suspect his involvement. And, of course, he wasn’t even in California when it was sent anyway.’
‘He might have been able to do a thing,’ I say.
He gives me a raised eyebrow.
‘A thing? You lost me there with your techno-babble.’
‘If he’s able to send an e-mail from California pretending it c
ame from the University of Glasgow, doesn’t it sound reasonable there’ll be some thing, a thing he could do, to allow him to send a delayed e-mail?’
Taylor stares expressionlessly across the café. A while later he nods.
The woman at the window gets to her feet. Her friend is talking about how the last school her children were at was so much better. Another couple of women walk in the door, and stand surveying the café, wondering where to sit. They notice the two leaving from the window and decide to wait for them.
THERE ARE TWO E-MAILS waiting for me when I get back to my desk, an unexpectedly long fifty-seven minutes after I left. Well, there are in fact thirty-seven e-mails waiting for me, but only two of any interest.
One from MacGregor stating that the original e-mail, asking if I had worked it out yet, was sent from a small café on Dumbarton Road, about ten minutes walk from the University. He had already been along there, identified the terminal from which it was sent, established it was paid for with cash, and had had a look at CCTV footage to see the identity of the person sitting in the seat. The man had a moustache, and was wearing thick-rimmed glasses and one of those ‘60s leather hats, like the Beatles had in Help. He didn’t know the name for that kind of hat, and neither do I.
In short, however, the guy was in disguise. They could also make out from the footage he was wearing gloves. Nowhere on the keyboard, regardless of how many times it had been used since, and it might not have been many, would there be any fingerprints worth collecting.
The guy came and he went, leaving nothing behind.
A decent job, the query followed down to the final detail, as far as it could go. My opinion of MacGregor rises a little.
The other e-mail is a follow-up to the previous one, which has caused us so much consternation. Same e-mail address, the same blank e-mail title, and again a single line of text.
If you work it out, I’ll stop.
I stare at it for a while, running through the implications. Morrow is at the desk opposite, but as usual, he has his head down. Good lad.
It doesn’t freak me out or anything, the way the last one did. No shock value this time. In fact, I’d been expecting it. I just sit there, reading it over and over, trying to decide everything it means.
Eventually I forward it to Taylor and, same as last time, summon Morrow to come with me as I walk into the office.
‘I think you’re going to have to get in touch with your fellow DCIs again,’ I say.
19
I have a real and unexpected sense of sadness I don’t quite understand. It comes from what I did yesterday afternoon, that at least I know.
It was as though I had a chance to redeem myself. Whoever is in charge, whatever force there is out there, I’d been given, or I’d given myself, the opportunity to atone. I’d wasted so many lives before, my own included, but finally I had found someone to believe in. I’d found Philo, and it didn’t matter it only lasted a few days. Maybe, in fact, it could only have lasted a few days. But it was enough, and it had given me the chance of a life again. All I had to do was stay true to her. True to that life.
It didn’t even mean I couldn’t ever be with another woman, fall for another woman, love another woman. But it had to mean something, and that something was most definitely not jumping on the first woman I came across whose clothes were a little too tight, and who was as interested as I was.
The woman in the office, and seriously I can’t even remember her name, was a test. That was why she was so easy. She wasn’t a teenager’s fantasy. She was a test. And I failed.
Someone out there is unhappy with me. I don’t know who it is. I don’t even think it’s Philo. But whoever or whatever they are, they have turned their back, and no longer do their hopeful eyes look upon me. I’ve taken the hope and I’ve washed it away.
That’s why I was sitting staring forlornly out of the window of the café across the road. That’s why I didn’t react the same way when the second message came in. That’s why I’m sitting here now with Taylor, in Connor’s office, barely interested in the conversation taking place, even though I’m at the centre of it.
Connor is shaking his head. Doesn’t like this kind of thing, obviously. Reasonable, however, to say nobody does. No one wants one of their detectives to be part of the story, other than the part that solves the crime.
Taylor had already told him about the first e-mail, which he’d been happy to pay not too much attention to, happy to believe it was aimed at the station rather than me, and happy to see it as confirmation of the story having something to do with the University.
‘Is it possible there’s something else going on at the University? A wider scandal, of which Tandy Kramer’s murder was just one part?’ asks Connor.
I lift my head. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard him make a good point. He is, as usual, ignoring me.
‘We need to check,’ says Taylor. ‘The sergeant can go along there.’
‘It’s possible this act of murder is just one thing among many,’ says Connor. Of course, having made a good point he now feels it necessary to labour it. ‘If there are other incidents taking place, not interesting enough for the news media, but that have been getting reported to the police, we wouldn’t necessarily have heard about them.’
‘Yes,’ says Taylor.
‘I’d like you to check it out before I go off on some wild tangent, roping in other forces, and trying to weasel in on the Clarkston investigation where, I have to tell you, we would not be popular.’
‘Yes.’
‘I accept that if, in some way, this has anything specifically to do with the Sergeant, and I think it’s far too early to make that presumption, then we will look at moving forward –’
‘I’ll call the University now,’ I say.
I get a glance from Taylor, and the usual who-the-fuck-are-you and I-didn’t-realise-you-could-even-talk look from Connor.
‘But I’ve been up there a couple of times already and no one’s said anything. It’s a good point and we should have checked before we came in here, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything. Either way, it won’t take long to establish. So I’ll go and make the call now, while you discuss the way forward. That is, if we’re going to look at the possibility this last e-mail was referring to the other Glasgow murders.’
I don’t wait for any approval. I think I’ve shocked the meeting by making a decision above my pay grade, so will just leave them to talk about me in quiet tones of general astonishment.
Walk out, close the door behind me. The last thing I hear is Taylor saying, ‘The sergeant has a point...’
BY THE TIME I’VE GOT an answer, there must be thirty minutes have gone by. Having been so fucking bold, I don’t want to get it wrong. Speak to five people from different administrative areas at the university, another couple of calls, then wrap it up by making a quick call to the Partick plods.
Nothing. There is nothing for anyone to stop, not in relation to someone getting pushed in front of a train. We know there’s not been a spate of weird crime around the streets of Cambuslang, so it can’t be that. I wonder, perhaps, if there have been other issues on the rail network, so put a call through to the transport police office and to Network Rail, and again there’s been nothing out of the ordinary.
Should have thought of all this before we went in there, obviously. Taylor is going to be kicking himself for not going in with all the facts. Neither of us is thinking straight. Wonder what his excuse is.
Nevertheless, he hasn’t emerged in all that time. I knock on the door, enter. Connor is on the phone and indicates with his usual superior air for me to sit down. Glance at Taylor.
‘We’re good,’ I say, quietly. ‘Sorry, should have thought of it bef –’
‘It’s fine. He just had to have his moment,’ says Taylor, voice low, as Connor is talking and wrapping up the conversation.
Phone down, he looks across the desk.
‘The DCI and I are going into R
iverside,’ he says. ‘Managed to pull it together without mentioning this second e-mail of yours. Is there anything?’
‘Looks pretty clear across the board,’ I say. ‘If we consider the various aspects of our case... Cambuslang, the rail network, the University connection, they all check out as having nothing particularly unusual happening crime-wise the last few days.’
‘You called Network Rail?’
‘And our Transport guys.’
‘Good good,’ he says. ‘I’ll save it for the meeting this evening, then. It should add weight.’
He’s nodding, but not at me. Persuading himself he’s done the right thing.
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