by William Paul
‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘Call me.’
‘I will.’
‘Promise.’
‘I promise.’
She left him, heading for the door where her husband Brian appeared to drape a coat over her shoulders among a crowd of other departing couples. Sally was suddenly beside Fyfe. He rolled down his sleeve. More secrets to keep, he thought.
‘Ready to go?’ Sally asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘You seemed to enjoy yourself. It wasn’t so bad, was it? After all your complaining too.’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘It wasn’t so bad.’
He kissed Sally’s cheek guiltily, knowing from experience that she would want to make love when they got home. Hilary had slipped from Fyfe’s sight but not his mind. In it he was able to follow her out and watch her gradually blend with the darkness, joining the other creatures of the night who inhabited the city and over whom he had no control. There were other things moving out there in the darkness too, so many different things, things that would affect him whether he liked it or not. The flesh of his arms prickled coldly where Hilary had written her name.
‘Shall we?’ Sally said, tugging at his arm. ‘Come on, let’s go. Stop dreaming. You were a million miles away there.’
Not far enough, Fyfe thought.
Chapter Five
Sunday, 00.27
Zena McElhose had her eyes open behind the mask. A cluster of pink-tinged white lights appeared like splashes of paint thrown against a wall and faded quickly. Then another one, then another one, in a silent, almost colourless fireworks display. She tried to impose some pattern of shape and coherence on the shifting lights but as soon as she identified one it was already dissolving and she could not be sure she had seen it in the first place. Eventually she grew tired of the game and pushed her sleep mask up on to her forehead.
It was impossible for her to sleep. Her mind was racing, flicking over dozens of trivial things she had done, or hadn’t done, or was planning to do. There was a new garden hose to buy, her magazine subscriptions to renew, competitions she wanted to enter, letters to be written, and it was her turn to choose the flowers for the church next week.
She did have a supply of sleeping pills but preferred not to take them. She regretted having had a nap in the middle of the afternoon, but she had fallen asleep listening to a boring radio play. It had been about a widow who placed an advertisement in the lonely hearts column of her local newspaper and then didn’t have the courage to actually meet any of the men who replied. Or at least she hadn’t by the time Zena nodded off. Maybe she did find true love in the end and lived happily ever after. Zena would never know. When she woke with a start the radio had moved on to a programme about the potential for recycling plastic bottles.
She climbed out of bed and the surrounding images converged inwards on her from the mirrors. She stepped into her slippers and tied her robe loosely around her. She picked up her wedding ring from the dressing-table and put it on her finger where it fitted snugly into the groove worn in her skin. Sidney watched her from the crowd of family pictures. She caught a glimpse of another fainter image in the thin glass over the photographs.
She went downstairs to the kitchen and opened a vacuum-packed bag of fresh coffee. The rich aroma spilled from the bag with an almost physical presence as she poured it into the filter. The machine gurgled and burped and leaked its end product into the glass container. Zena stood beside it with her face right up close, holding her hair back out of the way, watching intently. She wasn’t really interested in drinking the coffee but she liked to smell it and watch it being made.
She didn’t hear so much as sense the movement behind her. She was just idly wondering how she would fill her day and had remembered she intended going to church, when she turned round. It was a reflex action, done without thinking. The casual surprise of seeing someone beside her in the kitchen congealed immediately into shock and her whole body trembled with a terrible upwelling of fear that was just as quickly suppressed. What was happening, she wondered rationally? Maybe she had had a black-out? Her sense of time was displaced. She ran the events of the day over in her mind and still got all the way to her own kitchen where she stood now. Fear returned. Something was wrong.
‘What are you doing here?’ Zena asked.
There was no reply from the familiar face, just a blank stare and a sudden convulsion that seemed to affect the whole room. There was a shout from far away and an explosion of pink-tinged white light blocked out everything else. Zena found herself on the floor, her cheek pressed against the coldness of the vinyl covering. She expected the light to fade as it always did behind the mask but instead it grew brighter, and pinker, changing to red, a deep scarlet blood red. And the cold of her cheek started burning and she couldn’t understand why she didn’t feel the pain when it came roaring up through her fragile body, exploding it apart and killing her dead.
Chapter Six
Sunday, 08.25
Marianne Dunne opened the bedroom door and looked in on her daughter. The grinning Disney characters cavorted silently around the walls and spilled down on to the duvet on the bed. Lorna was lying on her stomach, face turned away towards the window where the dawn light was beginning to lighten the air behind the drawn curtains. Fine strands of blonde hair did not make a thick enough covering to hide the crown of her head. An arm lying on the pillow had the plastic apparatus for easy delivery of drugs taped to it, its tapering blue permanently inserted into a vein. All round it the skin was light blue, tending to green like a spillage of oil on a desert of white sand.
Marianne watched, checking for the slight rise and fall of the girl’s shoulders that showed she was breathing. She couldn’t see anything moving. A flutter of alarm made her take three quick steps across the room just as she convinced herself she was wrong, that there was movement. Her head touched the cardboard mobile hanging from the light fitting. The carousel of colourful ponies and clowns flapped round in an unsteady circle swinging against each other.
It was here she had found Sandy standing last night staring down on Lorna. The carousel had been in silent motion then. He always set it going when he came into the bedroom. It was the first thing he did, a flick of the wrist and off it went, spinning and gradually slowing until it came to a complete standstill. It was like Lorna’s life, he had once told her in a tone of voice that made her skin crawl; you can’t see what’s stopping it but you know that very soon it is going to come to an end.
Marianne reached out and held her hand a few inches from Lorna’s sleeping head. Goofy and Donald Duck lay hideously deformed among the creases of the duvet bundle. Behind her the carousel slowed and stopped. She backed away, satisfied her daughter was still alive. For the time being at least.
Outside a steady drizzle leaked from a leaden sky. Marianne pulled her front door shut behind her and hurried up the broad driveway to the big house, holding her coat tightly at her throat without bothering to fasten it. She shuffled awkwardly along, scraping her well-worn slippers against the ground to prevent herself stepping out of them. A huge black and white seagull stood on the lawn. Another was perched on the railing of the widow’s walk on the first floor. There were other gulls on the rooftops of the houses beyond the trees. Birds flying low inshore always presaged stormy weather.
Marianne was late. Mrs McElhose hated it if her early morning coffee wasn’t ready on time. She broke into a shambling trot as she crossed the expanse of gravel at the front of the house. She went right past the front door and down the narrow path at the side of the patio at the rear. She bent down to pick up the small statue of a frog beside the rusty boot cleaner and retrieved the back door key from its hiding place. She was surprised to find the door unlocked. But it was still stiff, requiring a good shove to open it and another to close it behind her.
She was in the outer kitchen with its flagstone floor and ancient head-high fireplace now blocked off and converted into a wall of shelve
s full of little-used garden equipment and other junk. Marianne took off her coat as she went to the inner door, an incongruously modern stainless steel design with frosted glass that led into the kitchen proper. The coat was draped over her arm as she pushed the door open and mounted the six-inch step. The strong aroma of coffee confused her. There shouldn’t be such a smell. She hadn’t made any coffee yet. Mrs McElhose never made her own in the mornings. Maybe her granddaughter Carole had arrived unexpectedly as she sometimes did. That was a possibility. Yet there were no cars in the drive. She might have flown north, taken a taxi in from the airport. But then surely she would have heard it coming past the gates.
Marianne stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked down on Mrs McElhose’s body on the floor at her feet. Her long silver grey hair had been stained pink by the blood that spread out in a halo round her head. The skin of her face was a livid white, cracked and scored like the surface of a crocodile skin bag. The red bruise was like a carnation, like the one Marianne had worn on her handbag at her cousin’s wedding and kept in a glass of water on the windowsill for a week afterwards. She stared, automatically checking for signs of breathing and seeing none. She reached out and held her hand a few inches from Mrs McElhose’s head, sensing only the coldness of death.
It was then she screamed. A deep-seated, penetrating shriek of protest and fear that hurt her throat. She turned and ran, still screaming as she stumbled over the flagstones and took several attempts to wrench open the back door. She ran up the path at the side of the house, leaving her slippers in her wake. She didn’t feel the rough gravel under the soles of her feet. The seagull on the lawn spread its wings and lifted clumsily into the air. The one on the railing of the widow’s walk swooped down and only just seemed to avoid colliding with the ground before it started to gain height again. On the tarmac driveway Marianne ran blindly into the arms of Sandy. The sight of him shocked her into silence. He was wearing only a thin T-shirt and jeans. His feet, like hers, were bare.
‘What is it?’ he shouted, holding her at arm’s length and gripping her shoulders so tightly it hurt. ‘I heard you scream.’
She struggled to find the words to explain and be able to breathe at the same time. She pointed back at the house. Saliva blocked the back of her mouth and caused her to cough. The shadow of a gull passed over them, darkening their faces.
‘She’s dead,’ she managed to say finally. ‘In the kitchen. She’s been killed.’
‘Call the police.’
Sandy left her where she stood and ran towards the house, disappearing down the same side path she had just come up. She looked from the big house down to her own house at the entrance gates. Lorna would be on her own, she realised with a heart-tugging pull of anxiety. Lorna might wake up and not know where anyone was. Lorna might panic. She might die all alone. Marianne, limping as belated pain asserted itself in her bruised feet, hurried home to make sure it didn’t happen.
Chapter Seven
Sunday, 08.47
On the freshly mown first tee at the Monarch’s Course at Gleneagles Sir Duncan Morrison, Chief Constable and six handicap golfer, addressed the ball. The horseshoe of people around him settled into impatient quietness as they waited for the first blow of the annual Edinburgh versus Glasgow senior police officers’ challenge to be struck. Early rain had passed over and the sun had come out. The smell of cut grass was in the air. Tea and bacon rolls had been served in the hotel, gossip exchanged, and raffle tickets sold. Now the serious business was about to begin. Bracken Brae, three hundred and ninety-four yards to the south-east, was the first hole. Beyond it was the glen of the eagles, the undulating Perthshire countryside and, on the horizon, the cloud-shrouded Ochil Hills where the rain had gone.
Sir Duncan had on all the gear. A Titleist visor, Pringle jumper, plus-twos, tartan socks, and black and white brogues. He waggled his driver, waggled his hips, and chewed on the stem of his pipe. It travelled from one corner of his mouth to the other as he raised the club back to shoulder height with practised slowness. The dimpled white ball was all shiny and wet on its bright red wooden tee.
Go on, David Fyfe thought maliciously. Dig a big divot out and make an arse of yourself.
The club swung down and hit the ball on the sweet spot. It cracked away along the fairway, perfectly straight except for a slight fade at the end of its flight which meant it landed and bounced towards the green perfectly. Sir Duncan stood in freeze frame, his arms wrapped round his neck, a triumphant puff of smoke emerging from the bowl of his pipe. The spectators applauded appreciatively. Fyfe grudgingly joined in as the rival Chief Constable, William Marshall, bent down to tee up his ball. He was the product of another collision with the expensive clothes section in the professionals’ shop and another low handicapper. His red leather golf bag had as many strategic bulges as a drug-pumped weightlifter. His ball followed the exact line of Sir Duncan’s, dropping just short of its length into the hollow in front of the slightly elevated green. There was more generous applause.
‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ Marshall said out loud. ‘Keep your bad shots for the parts of the course where you don’t have an audience.’
Everybody laughed. The two chiefs climbed into their motorised golf buggy and hummed away on the concrete track along the side of the fairway. The next pair occupied the tee.
Fyfe and his opponent, Detective Inspector Eric Bradley, knew each other fairly well from joint operations on the crime squad. They had played together before too and Fyfe had never beaten him. They were eighth of the twelve pairs to go so had plenty of time to spare. They strolled over to the putting green behind the starter’s hut and began to knock a few balls about. Fyfe was worried about making a fool of himself. Not only were his eyes sticky with lack of sleep after his late night but he hadn’t been playing regularly at all, hadn’t had a game for at least six months. When he had dug his clubs out of the cupboard under the stairs he found a mouldy growth on the heads of the woods and rust specks on the irons.
‘Have a late night, did you, Davie?’ Bradley asked.
‘Does it show?’
‘No more than usual for you, but you seem quieter. Something bothering you? Been working too hard?’
‘I’ll liven up. I just need a few birdies to put me in the mood.’
He aimed for a hole about five yards from him marked by a small metal flag. The ball missed by six inches on the left and travelled at least ten feet past. He tried again with another ball. It traced a path through the rain-soaked grass and stopped well short.
‘So how’s things with you anyway?’ Bradley said.
‘Same as ever,’ Fyfe replied, head down over a ball as he tried another putt. ‘Nothing new.’
There was something new though. Hilary was new. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, all gift-wrapped in her little black dress and her sensually pleading eyes. He checked his forearm for the phone number she had written there. He’d had a quick shower that morning before setting off, protecting his arm from the water so that it wouldn’t be washed clean. He didn’t know if it was her home or her office number. He didn’t know how she would respond if he phoned her anyway. Without the party atmosphere, the drink and the illusion of intimacy, maybe she would be acutely embarrassed to hear from him. He had had enough trouble with women in the past. Maybe it would be for the best if he left Hilary well alone. He tried a short, straight putt. It hit the flag and bounced off at a sharp angle.
‘Are we going to make this interesting, or what?’ Bradley asked.
‘It’s for the greater glory of the force. Can it be more interesting than that?’
‘Oh, I think so. How about a pound a hole and a fiver on the match?’
‘And nips for birdies?’
‘Of course,’ Bradley said.
‘And you give me six strokes.’
‘Yes. Six and the pleasure of my company.’
‘You’re on.’
Fyfe moved even closer to a hole and managed to sink his first put
t of the day. He was thinking that he would only phone Hilary if he won this match against Bradley. That would save him from having to make a decision one way or the other; it would be made for him. If he won he would call her up. If he lost he would take another shower and wash her away. That was settled.
Fyfe lined up a long putt. He hit the ball far too hard. It scooted across the wet grass and would have gone racing past but it clanked into the metal flag, jumped two feet in the air and vanished into the hole.
‘That’s more like it,’ Fyfe said, grinning over at Bradley. ‘Now I’m getting the hang of this game.’
Chapter Eight
Sunday, 09.50
Detective Inspector John Sapalski examined the old woman’s body, curiously curled like an acrobat in mid-flight, and the rubber-thick blood on the kitchen floor beside her. The dent in the side of her skull had a distinctive lattice pattern on the damaged flesh. The rich smell of the over-brewed coffee seemed to pour down from the worktop and cover the body like a transparent fog. Sapalski felt the nausea rise in his gorge and squeeze into the back of his mouth. He swallowed, grimacing at the vileness of the taste. He stayed where he was, squatting down, letting a wave of dizziness pass, hoping that no one behind him would notice how badly it was affecting him.
He might be young and raw but he had dealt with dead bodies before, car accident victims mostly when he was on the roads, still warm and bleeding in their twisted metal coffins. There had been a fair number of stabbings too once he had become a detective, and a strangling, and a shotgun killing that had blasted through a skull as if it was a ripe orange. Man’s inhumanity to man was rarely pretty though he could remember one call-out when they had found a young woman’s body provocatively draped over the top of a bed, all made-up and dressed in an elegant silk nightdress. There were four of them and they stood looking down on her for much longer than necessary. She was absolutely lovely and they were all wondering what had happened in her life to make death seem so attractive to her that she could so apparently calmly take an overdose and induce heart failure. Something had driven her over the edge and it must have been bad, very bad. But they never had found out the real reason.