by William Paul
Sapalski’s grandfather had settled in Scotland during the war too, confirming a tenuous link between the two men. Sapalski had never been to Poland either and the only time he had contemplated going was when a romantic notion overwhelmed him during the time of Solidarnosc and Lech Walesa. It had quickly passed. An aged uncle in a village outside Warsaw wrote to him twice a year in fractured English informing him of the continuing history of an extended family he had never met. He had a pile of fading photographs detailing the history of strangers. He and Ramensky would have had more in common if Sapalski was six inches taller and weighed five stone more.
Ramensky was suddenly grimacing horribly. His body tensed and stiffened, elongating. The cords round his neck muscles bulged alarmingly. He almost bared his teeth. Sapalski thought he was either suffering a heart attack or he was about to burst into tears. He watched in hypnotic fascination, half rising to go to his aid but unsure what he could do.
When Ramensky broke wind it rasped loudly like a piece of cloth being ripped in two. The springs of the chair below him resonated like a distant trumpet voluntary. Then his whole body relaxed as abruptly as it had tensed. His habitual hangdog expression returned.
‘You imagine all sorts of things,’ Ramensky continued. ‘If my grandfather had stayed in Poland he would never have met my grandmother Macdonald and I would never have been born. Therefore Lorna would never have been born. Therefore she wouldn’t have to die so young. That would solve the immediate problem, wouldn’t it?’
Sapalski decided to stop indulging the big man and get on with the job. Again, he noticed with annoyance, his notebook was filled mainly with doodles instead of writing. It didn’t matter. Both husband and wife would make and sign formal statements. The task had already been delegated. Sapalski could go home to his wife, but first he had to make contact with Chief Inspector Fyfe, sent back from the annual golf outing to watch over him. Fyfe was sure to be in a bad temper because of that, so Sapalski wanted to have every angle covered so there was nothing for him to complain about.
‘Sandy, did you kill Mrs McElhose?’ he asked.
Ramensky’s mind returned from its rambling excursion into his personal philosophy. He saw Sapalski opposite him as though surprised to find him there. He balled his fists and touched knuckles in front of his mouth then rubbed them hard into his eye sockets.
‘Do you know who did kill her?’ Sapalski asked.
There was more hesitation. Ramensky spread his fingers over his face, smoothing the skin, pulling his eyes out of shape to give himself a sinister Oriental-style look. Was he deliberately delaying? Did he know more than he let on? Sapalski couldn’t fathom him at all.
‘I reckon you’ll find out sooner or later,’ Ramensky said.
‘Find out what?’
‘Who killed her.’
‘We usually do.’
Ramensky sat back in the chair, squeezed tight between its arms. ‘It wasn’t necessary,’ he said. ‘To kill her, I mean.’
‘What do you mean, not necessary?’
‘She was old. She didn’t have much life left.’
‘That doesn’t mean she deserved to die.’
Ramensky’s wide shoulders rose and fell in a gesture of total defeatism. ‘Everything has its season. You live, you die. We’ve all got to die sometime, haven’t we?’ he said.
Chapter Fifteen
Sunday, 13.48
The bunch of keys was heavy, a solid weight dangling by its chain from finger and thumb. It rotated slowly, making the light move across the silver and brass. Maureen Gilliland sat at the dressing-table in her bedroom, trying to hypnotise herself with the keys so that she wouldn’t be afraid of what she had decided to do next. She didn’t hear the shuffling footsteps or the knock at the door. The voice cut through her concentration though, making her snatch the keys into her closed hand to hide them.
‘Are you all right in there, Maureen?’
‘Fine, Mum.’
‘Are you sure? You’re not looking well today.’
‘I’m okay.’
‘I don’t want an invalid on my hands.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be out to make the tea in a moment.’
‘I’ll just go back and read my book then.’
‘You do that.’
Gilliland listened to her mother shuffling away. She should have left home a long time ago, but it had never happened. She had been plagued by boyfriends when she was a teenager but had always remained coy and aloof. Then, suddenly, she was older and there were no boys interested in her any more and a future of barren loneliness stretched into the distance ahead of her. She retreated into a hard-skinned shell, covering all the mirrors in her room so that she didn’t have to look at herself. That way she was able to retain her own exclusive self-image as a youngster, ignoring the constant glimpses of a totally different person she saw reflected in shop windows or the metallic paint of parked cars. In this guise, she admired her idol Valentine from afar. Before his recent conversion to physical displays he had kissed her twice a year, at Christmas and on her birthday. For weeks beforehand every nerve-ending tingled with keen anticipation of the touch of his lips against her cheek. But she never responded other than with a shy smile, confining her claim on him to shocking night-time fantasies that left her breathless and ashamed at the degeneracy of her imagination.
Never once in twenty years did she give Val any cause to suspect her secret longing for him. Out of consideration for his wife Joan, who was also a member of St Andrew’s Church and of the flower-arranging committee, she never flirted, never imagined she would ever act inappropriately. But then Joan died and Val was available even if she was unable to think of it as anything but adultery. He certainly changed after the funeral, becoming alternately more distant and introverted, and outgoing and gregarious. He was obviously contemplating the same lonely future that Gilliland had been resigned to. On her last birthday he was slightly tipsy when he put his arm round her waist and kissed her hard on the lips, pressing the entire length of his body against hers. She had to rush to the bathroom and douse her face in cold water.
She was patient, not wanting to spoil things by adopting too presumptuous an attitude. She bided her time, judging the moment when she would make her declaration. The moment should have been today. And she discovered that he had been having a torrid affair with Zena McElhose. Not a young girl, but Zena, who limped around on her artificial hip and who was thirty years older than Gilliland.
She opened her fist. She had been squeezing the bunch of keys tightly and the marks of their teeth were deeply indented into her skin. It was her own fault that she had been betrayed. She should have announced her feelings much earlier. She should have comforted Val openly after Joan’s death, instead of settling for a chaste handshake at the crematorium. She stared into the rumpled surface of the sheet draped over the arched mirror in front of her. Too late now, she thought. Too late now.
The keys in her hand were the spare set Valentine kept. He had never told her why he carried such a varied set of keys or why there were so many. On the one occasion she had asked, he had just given her one of those confidential winks he always used when they talked about the big fee-paying clients. Now she knew. One of these keys presumably gave him access to Zena McElhose’s house. Others would be for other women. He had been doing it deliberately to taunt her.
Gilliland’s love for Val was being transformed into hate. She could feel it inside her, twisting and shrivelling like a piece of burning paper. She wanted to hurt Val, to damage him, to cause him to feel the same sort of pain she was now experiencing. He deserved it.
But first she had to make her mother’s tea.
Chapter Sixteen
Sunday, 14.11
David Fyfe stood in the room in the intensive care unit at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary surrounded by bleeping technology and watched a nurse run through a check list, consulting monitor screens rather than the wired-up patient lying prone on the bed with a butterfly-wing plaste
r like a Maltese Cross stuck to his forehead. The door opened and a young baby-faced doctor in a starched white coat entered. Fyfe recognised him but struggled for a name. McInnes, it said on his badge. Dr Ken McInnes, that was it. They had had dealings before. His hair was shorter, receding badly from prominent temples and a smooth-skinned brow. A stethoscope hung round his neck like a skinny pet snake.
‘Well, well, Chief Inspector, another day, another mystery.’
‘Good morning, doctor. How are you hanging?’
‘Swinging low as usual.’
‘Lost any patients recently?’
‘I’m up to quota. Good to see you’ve brought me a live one. You provided mainly stiffs in the past, if I remember correctly. Not a great deal even a talented medicine man like myself can do once the spark has been extinguished.’
‘So what about this one?’ Fyfe said, nodding towards the bed. ‘What are his chances?’
‘Reasonably good as we approach the Millennium. Back in the nineteenth century they would probably have planted him long ago. Now, however, we strive officiously to keep them ticking over. Science is a wonderful thing.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘In my professional opinion he suffered a myocardial infarction which rendered him temporarily unconscious causing him to fall over and inflict on himself the head injury you see here.’
‘He had a heart attack and fell over?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Absolutely. I will swear to it in a court of law too, if you make it worth my while.’
‘You’re pretty smart, Dr McInnes.’
‘Thank you for the compliment, Chief Inspector Forbes.’
‘Fyfe.’
‘Chief Inspector Fyfe.’
‘That’s okay. It’s been a while since we did our last body, and I don’t go around with a name badge.’
‘No name for our pal here, I see.’
‘No name badge for him either. If he did, it would make our job a lot easier.’
‘We call him John Doe. A bit of an Americanism, I realise, but we are living in the global village. All the tags were cut out of the clothes he was admitted in. Nothing in his pockets to identify him. Do you reckon he’s got something to hide?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Did he bump off the old lady?’
‘Possibly.’
‘Poor bastard maybe doesn’t want to wake up then?’
‘Who can tell?’
The nurse had gone. They were standing on opposite sides of the ICU bed. McInnes used a thumb to open the patient’s eyelid and shone a pencil-thin beam of light into the pupil. Then he turned round and studied one of the head-high screens, tracing the line with the fingers of one hand while he picked at spots on his face with the other.
‘How can you tell it was a heart attack?’ Fyfe asked.
‘Oh good, I get to blind you with science,’ McInnes replied.
‘Go on then.’
‘The electrical activity of the heart muscle can be recorded by an electrocardiograph like this one here. You see, the heart works like an electrical capacitor. Its normal pattern is to polarise and then depolarise, but in somebody suffering an infarction the rhythm is interrupted. It can be triggered by a number of things, bad diet, bad lifestyle, stress, over-excitement. And it generally happens over a number of days and finally it gets too much and the guy keels over. If a particular segment of an ECG is abnormal it evolves into what we call Q-waves, that hopefully don’t exist for healthy folk like you and me, although you being of a certain age are more at risk than me.’
‘So you can detect a heart attack before it happens.’
‘If people came in for an ECG every morning. But life’s not like that.’
Fyfe surreptitiously rubbed his hand over his heart, wondering what his personal ECG pattern would look like when he came face to face with Angela the next day. Stress, excitement, bad lifestyle. All the warning signs were there. McInnes yawned ostentatiously and flicked at his shirt collar.
‘I won’t bore you with an explanation of P-waves and T-waves and the QRS complex. No, basically our pal got a blast of his own mortality when his pump shut off the oxygen to his brain momentarily and down he went, bashing his head on the way.’
‘Will he survive?’
‘He would if it was just his heart. If he gets past the first few days there is an excellent survival rate six months after the event although after three years they’re dropping like flies. The head injury here is a distorting factor for evaluation purposes.’
‘Come on, medicine man, don’t fail me now.’
‘Science isn’t good at predicting the effect of a blow to the head. For John Doe, it might mean nothing worse than a mild headache. Or it might mean he’s as good as dead.’
‘Bad as that?’
‘There’s evidence of a small leakage of blood into the skull cavity. Not significant at this stage but a leak’s a leak. It could be worse, but it could be better. I’ve seen worse head trauma and total recovery. I’ve seen less apparently serious trauma and they end up lying in the cabbage patch upstairs.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘The neurological trauma ward. We keep it in the attic so as not to frighten folks still functioning.’
‘Is our John Doe going to come round?’
‘Who knows?’
‘As you say, maybe he doesn’t want to?’
‘Aha, so he did kill the old lady then.’
Fyfe was reluctant to condemn the unconscious man but didn’t see much alternative. If the fall had knocked him out that ruled out a third party and left him all alone. He looked relatively harmless lying on his back with his double chins puckered up, his bushy eyebrows, and his chest smeared with Vaseline to improve the contact of the electrodes.
‘The will to live is an important factor in these cases,’ McInnes said rather pompously.
‘What about the desire to die?’
‘That too.’
‘So what are you telling me, doctor?’
‘What do you want to hear?’
‘What would you tell his nearest and dearest?’
‘There is every chance of full recovery but you must be prepared for the possibility of death or brain damage and a continuous state of coma. Be optimistic but I don’t want to mislead you in any way.’
‘And me? What would you tell me? Does he live or die?’
‘One or the other.’
‘Which?’
‘If it was a horse race I wouldn’t bet on him. That’s not scientific by the way, that’s a gut feeling.’
‘Thanks for the diagnosis.’
‘Any time. That will be twenty-five guineas, please.’
‘Here’s my card. Call me if he reaches re-entry stage.’
Sapalski barged in at that moment, apologising for not arriving earlier, breathing heavily after running up the flights of stairs because he was more concerned with haste than dignity having said he would be at the hospital to meet Fyfe. He shook hands with Fyfe and stretched across John Doe to do the same with McInnes.
A stern-looking nurse with eyelashes like spider legs came in after him and stood at the end of the bed with her arms folded. She said something unintelligible to McInnes, turned on her heel and went to the door. Body language spoke volumes about there being more between them than a simple doctor-nurse relationship. He rolled his eyes at Fyfe, slipped the card into his breast pocket, excused himself, and followed her out leaving the two police officers alone with the accused man.
‘Sorry to take you away from your golf,’ Sapalski said.
‘Probably less grief for me in the long run,’ Fyfe answered.
‘You weren’t playing well then?’
‘For me, I was playing well. A couple of shots went straight. Is this our man then?’
‘As good as we’ve got,’ Sapalski replied. ‘At the locus red-handed, clutching the bloodstained murder weapon.’
‘Not a bad prosecution case. Who is
he?’
‘A blank so far, sir. His fingerprints are being checked but I’m not convinced that will help. It’s Sunday so we probably won’t get the result until tomorrow.’
‘Curious, this,’ Fyfe said, lifting one of the unconscious man’s arms. ‘Look at his hands. Look at the fingernails. They’re beautifully manicured, a professional person’s hands. He’s not from the artisan class. He’s not your average housebreaker. He must have been in it for the fun of it.’
Sapalski studied the floppy hand, each finger in turn. ‘You’re right,’ he concluded.
‘The first of Zena’s little paradoxes.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Just thinking aloud.’
‘Maybe he only did big houses,’ Sapalski suggested. ‘Antiques and that kind of stuff. Posh side of the business.’
‘Maybe,’ Fyfe conceded doubtfully. ‘But did he really need overalls and a balaclava? Bit of the romantic there. Bit of an adventurer.’
‘A romantic adventurer turned savage killer with a meat-tenderising mallet. Not a happy ending.’
‘It’s believable. The first thing that came to hand. Not every story has the fabled happy ending. What else should I know?’
Sapalski filled Fyfe in on the details of Marianne Dunne finding the body, and big Sandy Ramensky mooching about morosely. When he told him about poor terminally ill Lorna back at the lodge house, he dropped his voice respectfully. He told him about Ramensky’s fantasy of transferring the life from a living person into his daughter to save her, and offered it tentatively as a very long-shot as a motive for killing old Zena if they wanted an alternative to the simple option of the killer in the balaclava. Fyfe was not as sceptical as Sapalski seemed to think he should be. Fyfe automatically connected little Lorna with Lorna Doone who was fixed in his mind as a tragic literary heroine although he couldn’t remember the author or the ultimate outcome of the storyline. Had Lorna’s parents condemned their baby when they named her?