The Silent Games

by Alex Gray

  He stopped for a moment to let the murmuring break out. Plant the idea of daft wee laddies messing about in the woods, Pinder had suggested. A prank that went wrong. Lorimer had raised his eyebrows at that, but so far it seemed to be working.

  ‘The main road should be accessible later today and diversion signs have been put in place until then. If you have been listening, you will know that the radio stations are issuing regular bulletins to that effect,’ Lorimer told them, managing a smile.

  He folded his hands and nodded, the signal for a forest of hands to be raised.

  ‘Any sign that it’s terrorist activity?’

  Right off, the question he had expected.

  Lorimer’s smile broadened. ‘It has all the hallmarks of a home-made bomb,’ he reiterated. ‘Something that anyone could get off the internet.’

  ‘You think it was done by kids?’ someone else demanded.

  ‘There were no witnesses to whoever planted the explosive device,’ Lorimer said, adopting a bored tone, as though he had explained this several times already. ‘So we cannot rule out any particular age group.’

  ‘But it might have been?’ the same voice persisted.

  ‘It would be entirely wrong for me to point a finger at the young people in the community,’ Lorimer said blandly, knowing full well that they were scribbling down that very thing as he uttered the words, and mentally apologising to any computer-geeky schoolboys in Drymen.

  ‘How much damage has been done?’ one female reporter wanted to know. Lorimer told them, giving as many statistics as would satisfy a readership hungry for facts.

  What he did not tell them was the way the clouds of ash had settled on his hair, the whiff of burning birds and animals discernible through the acrid smell carried on the morning breeze. Nor did he describe the scar on the hillside, a mass of blackened tree trunks instead of the once graceful outline of pines fringing pale skies to the west. And there was certainly no mention of any further threat to the good citizens of Stirlingshire or their near neighbours in the city of Glasgow.

  Chapter Three

  The letter, when it came, had the typewritten address of the Stewart Street police office rather than his home on the south side of Glasgow. Lorimer picked up the long, bulky envelope, curious about the handwritten word Personal on the top left-hand corner. He tore it open with the sharp metal letter-opener given to him by an ex-SAS soldier turned crime writer, its twisted shaft crafted in the man’s own workshop. Lorimer’s face expressed resignation at what was probably just another missive full of political invective against the police in general: it was one of the several things that a detective superintendent with his public profile had to endure. But the envelope’s thickness both intrigued him and made him cautious as he felt along its length for any device that it might contain.

  The letterhead bore a familiar crest and Lorimer smiled to himself as he skimmed the covering letter, immediately banishing any suspicious thoughts. There were several pages, not clipped together, giving details of the other invitees, the hotel and a route map to get there, probably shoved into every invitation regardless of the recipient’s proximity to the venue. Sitting back in his chair, Lorimer read the letter again. A school reunion. To take place next spring. Would he like to attend? The policeman’s first instinct was to bin the whole lot. As if he’d have the time for something as inane as that! But as he continued to read to the end, a small frown appeared between his blue eyes.

  Vivien Gilmartin. The surname was unfamiliar, but Vivien . . . ? Could it be the same person he had known all those years ago? Turning to the pages of names, Lorimer’s eyes scanned the list. There it was, Vivien Gilmartin, née Fox!

  For a moment he let the papers slip on to the desk, his eyes seeing beyond the four walls of the Stewart Street office to a place and time that seemed to rush back at him with an intensity that took his breath away.

  Vivien. Foxy, they’d called her, not only because of the obvious surname but for her mass of glorious red hair.

  He’d slipped his teenage fingers through those tresses in his first fumbling attempts at sex, believing himself to be in love. And tall, lanky William Lorimer and his red-haired girl had listened over and over to the words of cheesy pop songs and his mother’s ancient collection of vinyl as though they had been penned just for them.

  It had been the summer before his final year at Glenwood High school, a time of waiting for exam results, walking through the park on hot dusty days, dreaming about the future. He was going to become a famous art historian. Travel the world, maybe. Vivien would be somewhere in his plans, a vague figure but one he was sure of back then, in that idyllic time of carefree youth when everything was possible.

  Her own plans had involved the theatre. That was something he could not fail to recall. And when she told him that RADA had accepted her and she was leaving Glasgow for faraway London, he had felt nothing short of betrayal. How could she abandon him? Why not take up the offer of a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, as it was then known? He was destined for Glasgow University; they could be together!

  Alone in his bedroom he had indulged his sorrows in the words of an Incredible String Band song, wallowing in its poignancy. At the time it had seemed so apt. Now, many years on, he hardly remembered the lyrics; something about first love, young love: wasn’t that right? What came after that? He had forgotten much of the rest except the lines referring to a girl’s long red hair that had fallen on to the boy’s face during their first kiss. Was that a real memory?

  The telephone ringing on his desk brought Lorimer back to the present, and as he picked up the handset, the contents of the letter were pushed to one side.

  Moments later he hung up again with a sigh. This was the day when the new alarm system was to be installed, and the engineer would require access to his office in half an hour. Minimum disruption, they’d all been told, but he doubted that. Still, the security of Police Scotland had to be maintained and upgraded to meet these new national standards.

  Lorimer looked again at the papers lying on his desk, memories of the people he used to know swirling in his brain. He’d never kept up with the old gang, eschewing Friends Reunited and Facebook, preferring the caution of anonymity given his chosen profession. And now, as if the years had been peeled away, he had this burning curiosity to know what had become of them. What has become of Foxy? a little voice teased him.

  It had all been so long ago, that summer he wanted to forget and the terrible months that had followed. He’d been in the art studio in late September when the head teacher had drawn him into the upstairs corridor with the news about his mother’s death. A brain aneurysm, something sudden and unforeseen.

  As the son of aged parents, Lorimer had never known his mother as a quick and graceful woman, the person so many of her friends had described at Helen Lorimer’s funeral. Dad had died when he was just a wee lad, the sixty-a-day habit ruining his lungs, cutting off his life far too early, leaving his teacher wife to struggle on as best she could. And so, at eighteen, the tall young man who would become a detective in the city of Glasgow had grown up fast, leaving behind all his dreams, which included a red-haired girl and their cosmopolitan future together.

  There was a slip at the foot of the page for current home address and dietary requirements, plus a box to tick if he decided to go to the reunion. It was the work of a minute to fill it in and stuff it into the ready-stamped envelope addressed to Mrs Vivien Gilmartin. For a moment he paused, the return letter in his hand. Then, with a careless flick, he sent it spinning to his out-tray, turning his attention to the report on the Drymen explosion.

  He would likely hear nothing more about the bombing incident after today. Once the report was sent to Special Branch, his part in the sorry affair was over. And there were plenty of other crimes in this city to capture his attention, Lorimer told himself, tapping out the words on his keyboard.

  Life would continue as before, the threat of a mad bomber something to be
filed away under August 2013. The detective superintendent felt no undue premonition of disaster, neither to his city nor to himself.

  What William Lorimer could not know on that August morning was that several malignant forces were already at work, insidiously preparing to wreak havoc in the very fabric of his life.

  Chapter Four

  Peter Alexander MacGregor scrolled down the page to read the final instructions. Everything seemed to be accounted for: the fares were paid, the passports up to date, accommodation taken care of. All he had to do was remember to get Joanne to pack his kilt carefully in layers of tissue paper and they would be off. He sat back, suddenly feeling every one of his sixty-eight years. Too much working in the garden yesterday, he told himself, knuckles kneading the base of his spine; he’d been overzealous clearing the winter debris from the paths after the gale that had swept up the coast. Peter heaved a sigh, looking round the old wood-panelled study. He’d be glad when the winter was over and he could sit in the garden enjoying a fine spring day, listening to the bell birds annoying his chooks. From the window he could see the wind blowing leaves high into the air, hear the rain rattling against the pane, a loud reminder that their Antipodean winter was reluctant to let go. He sighed again and closed his eyes, trying to imagine what it might be like in Scotland right now. It was seven p.m. here in Melbourne, so it was still early in the morning back there. And still summertime.

  The trip was months away, but even now Peter felt a frisson of excitement at the thought of travelling through the old country. To attend the MacGregor Gathering was one of his life’s ambitions, but to do so in a year when the Scottish government was having a Homecoming, the city of Stirling celebrated seven hundred years since Bannockburn and Glasgow was hosting the Commonwealth Games . . . well, it all seemed too good to be true. He sat forward and blinked at the screen again, then scrolled back up, anxious not to have missed any small detail before he finalised the whole thing. That they had never met his host shouldn’t matter; the man was another MacGregor after all, and the Scots were famous for their hospitality.

  As his finger hovered above the send button that would signal his acceptance, Peter MacGregor felt a sudden sense of unease. What if something went wrong? What if either he or Joanne fell ill during the months away? What if his neighbour forgot to water the plants?

  ‘Cup of coffee, darling?’ Joanne was at his shoulder, smiling down on the page, her face lighting up when she saw what he was about to do.

  He couldn’t disappoint her, wouldn’t wipe away that expression of delight for anything.

  ‘Sure thing. Just be a minute.’

  And as his finger pressed the send button, that small action sealed a fate that neither of them could possibly have imagined.

  Chapter Five

  April 2014

  ‘“April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land”,’ Maggie quoted. ‘Why does T. S. Eliot say it is the cruellest month?’ she asked the class of fourteen Sixth Years, who were all looking at her intently.

  One hand shot up and Maggie struggled to hide a smile. Imogen Spinks reminded her so much of Hermione, the swotty character from Harry Potter, even down to the mass of mousy curls cascading down her back.

  ‘Anyone?’ Maggie offered, giving the rest of them time to answer.

  ‘Yes, Imogen,’ she said at last, to a quiet undertone of groans from some of the others. She swept a cross look at the class, as if to say you had your chance too.

  ‘He thinks that the growth of lilacs is an irony after the carnage and death of the Great War,’ Imogen said. ‘Ironic things can be cruel,’ the girl added thoughtfully.

  ‘What is it with him and lilacs?’ Jeremy Graham’s grumble issued from the back of the classroom, making the other students turn round.

  ‘How d’you mean?’ Sarah Gillespie asked, flicking the black hair out of her heavily mascaraed eyes.

  ‘Well he’s always on about lilacs, isn’t he? That wumman who had lilacs in her room, twisting them in her fingers?’

  ‘Bet that made a right mess on the carpet,’ Janice Gallagher suggested, provoking some mild laughter from the girls.

  ‘Our lilac tree isn’t usually out till May,’ Kenny McAlpine said. ‘So he’s got that wrong, hasn’t he?’

  ‘The south of England is at least six weeks ahead of us,’ Imogen said pointedly, giving the boy a withering look. ‘And to suggest that anything Eliot wrote was wrong shows just how little you know about him!’

  Maggie hushed the protests that followed the girl’s remark. Imogen, who was the first of Maggie Lorimer’s pupils to have been accepted for the University of Cambridge, could be a real pain in the neck, but she was very well read and certainly knew her stuff. Just like Hermione, a small voice teased, forcing the teacher to smile even as she tried to bring the lesson back to order.

  ‘Eliot was an extremely well-educated man,’ Maggie agreed. ‘Erudite, one might say.’

  ‘Do we write that one down?’ Sarah asked. ‘And look it up?’

  Maggie nodded, but already the pupils (with the exception of the already erudite Imogen) were consulting dictionaries and writing down the definition. It might be old-fashioned, but she had schooled them all to look up words they had never used before and write them in a notebook, insisting that a wider vocabulary was a huge asset to them all. It had taken a while since the beginning of the academic year, but now finding dictionary definitions and using new words had become second nature to them. And from the eager way they pored over the dictionaries, Maggie knew they actually enjoyed it.

  Jeremy’s hand was up first and the boy did not wait for Maggie to acknowledge him.

  ‘“Having or showing knowledge or learning”,’ he quoted.

  ‘Sounds like Imogen,’ someone said, and sniggered. ‘Specially the showing bit.’

  Imogen’s face reddened as Maggie glared at the giggling girls. That might be true, but there was no need to embarrass her in front of the class.

  ‘Right, let’s see how much knowledge and learning you lot are capable of,’ she said. ‘I want to be certain that you have all studied The Waste Land thoroughly by next term. I’ve set an exam question for you to work on over the holidays, so that’s why we’ve spent time discussing this poem in class. Okay?’

  Nods and sighs from the pupils were drowned out by the sharp drilling of the period bell, and Maggie watched as these fourteen young men and women shoved books and files back into their bags, rising to leave for their next class.

  Imogen was the last to leave and she turned to speak to her English teacher.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me, you know,’ she said. ‘Once I’m at university, I probably won’t see any of them ever again.’ Then, with a rare smile that made the girl almost pretty, she shrugged and walked out of Maggie’s classroom, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Ah, the confidence of youth!’ Maggie said quietly to herself. ‘Best of luck when you get to Cambridge, Imogen.’

  There was one period to go before the final bell of the day, which would signal the end of term, and Maggie had no class on her timetable. She had the option of packing up and leaving her classroom now, something that the head teacher had said was reasonable given the amount of work the staff took home anyway. But she would be spending long enough alone this evening as it was. Tonight was the night that Bill was going to this school reunion, something he had been a bit quiet about. Maggie guessed he wasn’t really looking forward to seeing what had happened to mates from more than twenty years ago. She would sit here until school was over for the afternoon and wait for the car park to clear before heading off across the city. The evenings were so much lighter now and it was a pleasure being able to sit by the kitchen window and watch the birds feeding in their garden, Chancer the cat safely tucked on her lap.

  Maggie drew the small blue poetry book towards her and opened its well-thumbed pages. April is the cruellest month, she read again. Then, looking out of the classroom window as a seagull soared pas
t, she recalled what Imogen Spinks had said: ironic things can be cruel. Maggie shivered suddenly. She was married to a man whose life revolved around crimes where cruelties often occurred. But somehow she doubted he would ever voice such a thing at tonight’s school reunion.

  There were lilac trees blossoming in the gardens of the small market town that the lorry rattled through on its way back to the motorway. The stop outside this village, far from the prying eyes of any CCTV cameras, had been necessary, but the driver was glad to be back on the road again, his cargo safely stowed.

  Don’t think of them as human beings, the big man had scoffed. See them in terms of the wad of cash you get every time you bring them in. And he had tried to, he really had, thought Gerry. But the look in the young woman’s eyes as he had bundled her back into that stifling narrow space had given him pause. It had been a look that had reminded him that she was more than mere cargo to be collected from the docks and delivered up to Scotland.

  Gerry remembered the banging behind his cab, a faint sound soon drowned out by the noise of the lorry’s engine. He’d warned the girl during the toilet stop, taken her arm and clutched it so tightly that she had yelped in pain. He hadn’t wanted to touch her, let alone hurt her, but the risk of discovery was too great a threat and so his fingers had left pale marks as he had released her black skin from his grasp. Then, that look. Those great solemn eyes had regarded him with an expression of utter fearfulness; no woman had ever looked at Gerry Collins like that before. He would be glad when the long journey north was over and he had delivered her to the big man.