by William Paul
‘Is it?’
There was a better case for its origin being closer to home than that. A cat substitute for the foot of her bed when Randy Randolph the boss wasn’t available. Fyfe tried not to smile and began to worry about what might happen next once he extricated himself from Mrs Gilliland’s living-room. Every off-duty officer was being recalled to ensure that the situation didn’t get out of hand. Sir Duncan, back from Gleneagles to act the omnipotent Chief Constable, was handling the media personally, going on television to show how seriously the force was treating the whole situation. Yet what crime was there left to investigate? Randolph had as good as confessed to old Zena’s murder in the letter conveniently displayed on his study desk for the next casual passer-by to find. Gilliland’s convincing imitation of a suicide bomber after borrowing Randolph’s Mercedes clearly demonstrated her complicity to any jury with half a brain between them. She had discovered Randolph’s fling with Zena, demanded he end it, and flipped her lid when she heard the news about the murder. The things that went on behind the closed doors of polite society. She must have known it was Randolph straight away, and with him being caught there was no one to wait for so she decided to end it all in a blaze of glory. In fact, rather than the alternative of fading away into lonely and unloved old age, she had died gloriously. Give her the benefit of the doubt and call Sapalski an unfortunate accident. Not her fault at all. If Randolph, Gilliland and Sapalski had been citizens of Greece it would be called a tragedy.
‘It was her birthday tomorrow, you know,’ the old woman said, her voice quavering with sorrow to a degree that was almost comical.
Fyfe knew. The personalised birthday card to his only true love had been found in Randolph’s office. Presumably it was ready to be handed to Maureen when she arrived for work with a perfunctory peck of a kiss so office gossip would continue to ignore the relationship. The card was more jam on the thickly spread circumstantial sandwich. Intriguing too, that the call to the radio programme had been made from the phone box outside the Randolph and Runciman office. And how to account for Randolph’s curious cupboard full of neatly labelled treasure hunt clues?
‘She would have been forty-three tomorrow. Imagine. My baby, such an age, such an age for my little girl.’
The grieving mother sobbed quietly while Fyfe began to make his excuses and prepared to leave. The son and daughter-in-law entered as he stood up. They exchanged meaningful looks with him that meant they accepted the transfer of responsibility. Anna McGrory stayed on anyway.
The cat rubbed itself against Fyfe’s leg. He bent down and smoothed the fur on its head and neck. It arched its back and purred. He hooked a finger under its collar and lifted it on to its hind legs as if he was testing its weight.
‘Good boy, Randy,’ he said stupidly. ‘Good boy.’
It took a cynical bastard to look beyond what was staring them in the face at that particular moment and Fyfe was looking. Why did someone dress up in overalls, balaclava and surgical gloves to inform a lover it was all over between them? Was it a question worth asking? They already had enough answers to give an acceptable solution. Why make work for himself? Why make work for anyone else? Why bother?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sunday, 21.17
Ramensky screwed up his face and swallowed the rum he hated so much. It slid down his throat like melting tar reminding him of hot summers and sticky tarmac roads that gripped the soles of training shoes and made a soft ripping sound as they were torn away.
‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, sir?’
He was sitting at another bar in another pub. A young man’s face was looking into his. Above a bright red shirt and black bow tie, it had raised scar tissue on the right cheek and above the right eye which also had a slightly swollen lump underneath it. The nose was broken and the ears were all squashed out of shape. Jagged edges of jet black brilliantined hair hung over his forehead like shark’s teeth. And yet in the midst of this battered and deformed facial package, the human teeth were perfect. Ramensky stared curiously, watching them appear and disappear behind the moving lips. They were evenly spaced and beautifully white and seemed to be totally out of place. The teeth had to be false, but they gave the impression of being natural. How was it possible for a face such as this to take so many knocks and retain its teeth in such mint condition? Ramensky contemplated the conundrum and pushed his empty glass forward, indicating that it should be refilled.
‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, sir?’
It was a reasonable question. Ramensky knew he had drunk more than enough in purely physical terms. He had already thrown up twice and the way his stomach was churning it would not be long before he did so again. But couldn’t this guy with the perfect teeth understand that he was beyond the physical? He wasn’t drinking to destroy his body, but to destroy his thoughts. He wanted to stop his brain working. He wanted to stop himself thinking because the guilt over Lorna, and now the idea that he might have killed old Zena, was becoming intolerable. It was rising to a crescendo and he could see no way of avoiding it. So he drank, the liquid equivalent of banging his head against the wall. And somehow his thoughts managed to survive fully formed to torment him and so he kept drinking. He couldn’t even get drunk properly.
‘I think you’ve had enough, sir. Why don’t you go home now?’
Ramensky shook his head slowly. ‘I should have done it, you know,’ he said sadly. ‘I saw the man. I went to see him. It could have been arranged, he said. Why not then, I said.’
‘Of course, sir.’ A consoling hand patted his arm. ‘Come on, friend. Time to go home.’
‘Too late now though.’
‘Yes, it’s late.’
Ramensky stared at the set of perfect white teeth and was suddenly aware there were two other people standing behind him. He straightened up slowly and turned his head to see them. They were red-shirted clones of their colleague on the business side of the bar, big muscular guys but still nowhere near as big as Ramensky. One was glowering at him, the other was smiling with malicious pleasure. He had a short wooden truncheon in his hand, the leather strap wrapped round his wrist, with A Present from Malaga carved on it. The other customers in the pub had retreated to a safe distance leaving plenty of empty space.
Ramensky returned the smile. This was a situation he could understand. This was what he had been waiting for. The blow of his head against the wall that would split his skull and let all his thoughts leak out and drain away. He turned back and hunched over the bar.
‘No trouble now, friend,’ the teeth said. ‘There’s the door. If you walk out no one will get hurt.’
Ramensky had eased his hand inside his coat and got hold of the neck of the bottle of Black Bush whisky. He had been drinking it while wandering the streets, falling asleep briefly in a close where the bitter cold wouldn’t allow him to lie for long. There was a little whisky left in the bottom of the bottle, but hardly any. He had had more than enough to drink anyway.
‘I saw the man,’ he said. ‘I saw the man.’
‘Have it your way.’
Ramensky drew the whisky bottle out as if it was a gun from a shoulder holster but his movements were ridiculously slow and cumbersome. When he swung it backwards with his arm the red shirts easily dodged out of the way. The bottle slipped from his grasp and hit a wall mirror end on, shattering it, causing a rainfall of broken glass and prompting the sound of female shrieking and scrambling feet. The truncheon hit him on the side of the head, knocking him backwards. He didn’t feel anything but a dull, distant thump. He was still on his feet, a hand up to his head in self-defence. Blood was running into his eye and down the side of his nose. When he breathed in he tasted blood. Somebody was hitting him in the kidneys. There were hands on his neck, pulling his hair. He swung a punch but made no contact. The truncheon smacked into the other side of his head making a cracking sound, like a well-struck golf ball. He went down on his knees and somebody kicked him on the chin, making him bite his ton
gue. That hurt him the most. He fell on to his side and curled up as the blows continued to rain down on his head and back. Unconsciousness came only gradually.
Chapter Thirty
Sunday, 21.49
The lighting in the empty police canteen was surreal. Mostly it was in darkness except for a wash of pale moonlight through rain-flecked windows and overhead strips in the adjoining kitchen sending down beams that looped round the abandoned glass and stainless steel serving counters and bounced off the formica-topped tables. Somebody had suggested they come down to the basement rather than stand around in the main crime room with Sapalski’s empty desk sitting there like an open grave.
One of the big illuminated vending machines among the row of four was flashing a personal morse code message. It looked like the lounge of a sinking ship with tables and chairs thrown about haphazardly as it listed, throwing the assembly of detectives down into a single corner. Superintendent Les Cooper was at the centre of the group, still in his golf clothes, with everybody round him in a ragged circle. He was holding some paper in his hands. The others mostly had little white plastic cups. Fyfe stood on the fringe, concealing a yawn that rose from deep inside him, thinking childhood memory thoughts of how the gathering resembled a scout troup watching a knot-tying demonstration.
‘The parrot bookend was stolen from Sir Duncan’s home,’ Cooper was explaining. When everybody looked blank he added: ‘Sir Duncan, our Chief Constable. These are his initials, that is probably the date on which it was stolen, and the other numbers appear to be the code for disabling his alarm system. He tells me he had noticed the pair of bookends was gone and wondered what had happened to them, but it really seemed too trivial to worry about.’
Fyfe grinned with the rest of them but it was quickly overtaken by a puzzled frown. The top notch lawyer Valentine Randolph, it seemed, had a curious sideline breaking into his friends’ houses. So far the owners of the bookend, the tin opener, and the cat’s flea collar had been identified. All, bar Sir Duncan, were members of St Andrew’s Church. The tin opener was the minister’s. The collar was from Randy, Maureen Gilliland’s cat. The paperweight belonged to the church organist.
Why Randolph did it was anyone’s guess. Maybe he got a buzz from it. Unless there was another cupboard still to be found, it had been going on for just under a year, starting soon after his wife died. A lifetime of legal correctness, rounded off by a few evenings of illicit thrill seeking. Nothing bad, of course, since Randolph was an honourable man. Nothing harmful or unpleasant. Just a spot of breaking and entering and the theft of an object of small value and importance. If a householder noticed it was gone he was hardly likely to call in the police. Who would bother for a missing flea collar, or a tin opener or a bookend? Come to think of it, where was the other parrot bookend?
It made sense of the overalls and the balaclava and the surgical gloves, and it confirmed the motive to an extent. Old Zena must have disturbed him in the act. He had grabbed the mallet and felled her. The adrenalin rush then hit him like a runaway truck and his heart couldn’t take the shock so he keeled over as well. When Marianne Dunne stumbled over the bodies the secret was out. Except the love note left on his desk didn’t quite fit in with the scenario. If he was knocking off old Zena why break into her house all dressed up? Maybe it was part of the games they played? Or maybe he meant to frighten her? Maybe he had already told her their affair was finished and then hoped to get a hard on by going back and pinching a bauble? Or maybe when he went back he really did mean to murder her?
Fyfe’s phone rang. He extracted it from his pocket and backed away from the circle of shirt-sleeved men, bumping against tables as he went, scraping table legs over the floor, attracting annoyed backward glances.
‘It’s me. Hilary.’
‘Well hello. Long time no see.’
‘I saw you on the television news. Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Never better.’
They must have got pictures of him at the crash scene, Fyfe realised. He hoped they hadn’t managed to catch him off guard and film the tears he had shed. That wouldn’t do his reputation as a hard bastard any good at all. It was nice of Hilary to be concerned. He would love to cry on her shoulder.
‘Are you sure you’re all right? It looked nasty.’
‘It always looks worse than it is. Believe me, I’m fine.’
‘What was it about?’
‘Who knows? People’s lives fractured into a thousand bits. We’re just trying to make sense of it now.’
‘You’re still working, are you?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘We can all sleep safely in our beds tonight then.’
‘By ourselves?’
‘By ourselves,’ she answered with what sounded like a regretful sigh.
What was she trying to tell him? He sensed that she wanted him back for another friendly bundle on the sofa then, without a word being said, she would lead him through to the bedroom and into her bed where they would sleep safely together. The prospect appealed to him hugely but he didn’t think it was the right thing to do with his colleague Sapalski slowly stiffening on the mortuary slab. There was another reason too. He wasn’t ready for Hilary. He knew it was Angela that was causing him to hesitate. Shag in haste, repent at leisure. How he was repenting now that Angela had her claws in him once again. Hilary was a warning to him, another temptress. Was it possible that she and Angela were sisters, separated at birth but with some kind of telepathic link that made them look so good in little black cocktail dresses? He noticed the other detectives were filing out of the canteen, stepping into a bright white rectangle of light flooding in from the corridor that made them look like aliens boarding their spaceships.
‘You’re not feeling sad, are you?’ he asked.
‘Not so much sad as lonely.’
‘I’m stuck here for the night.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sorry. I’d come round but I just can’t get away.’
‘Pity.’
‘A great pity.’
‘What about lunch tomorrow?’
His stomach turned over. Was this deliberate? Maybe Hilary and Angela were working together, like co-stars in an Alfred Hitchcock movie plotting to drive the leading man insane.
‘I can’t do lunch, not tomorrow. I’m booked, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh.’
The sprinkling of truth in his carefully constructed pack of lies made him sound as if he was playing far too hard to get. He had to relent or he would lose Hilary, and that was the last thing he wanted. He was imagining the recent touch of her fingers on his face, the soft pressure of her breasts against his arm, and the darting of her tongue against his teeth as they kissed.
‘I’d like to see you though.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes. I’ll call you.’
‘Please.’
‘I can’t have you being sad and lonely. I’ve just got to get this case out of the way.’
‘I’ll let you get on with it then.’
‘Okay. See you soon.’
‘See you. Call me. I’ll be waiting.’
The phone beeped as the connection was broken. Fyfe turned and found Sir Duncan Morrison standing at a discreet distance waiting to speak to him. He was, Fyfe judged instantly, too far away to have overheard. There was somebody else Fyfe didn’t recognise beside him, a tall man looking round the room like a nervous, over-awed child.
‘Just checking in with the wife,’ Fyfe said.
‘Here you are then.’
Fyfe took what was handed to him. ‘What’s this?’
‘Your voucher for a night at Gleneagles Hotel. Be sure you and Sally enjoy yourselves.’
‘We will.’
‘This is Gregor Runciman, Val Randolph’s partner. He’s only just found out what’s been happening.’
Fyfe offered to shake hands but Runciman didn’t seem to notice. He looked awful. His suit was creased and the knees were stained. His naturally
sallow skin appeared to be a veneer of light varnish over a bloodless surface below. Fyfe put it down to the shock of hearing about the death of a long-standing friend.
‘Small accident,’ he said illogically. ‘I’ll get over it. We were at school together, you know.’
‘We were?’
‘Me and Val. Known each other all our lives.’
‘It must be terrible for you.’
‘And Zena. I knew Zena. She was our client.’
Runciman nodded as he confided the information and stared wildly as though expecting Fyfe to say something significant. Fyfe wondered if the shock of Sapalski’s death had affected him as badly as Zena McElhose’s death, apparently murdered by his old friend Randolph, had affected Runciman. He hoped not.
‘It’s been a long day for both of us, David. We’ll get a chance to speak to Gregor properly later. In the meantime I think we’ll let the next shift carry on and come back fresh in the morning.’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘Right then. Let’s all go home.’
Chapter Thirty-One
Sunday, 23.55
His two black labradors met Fyfe at the front door, capering and jumping about him as he came in to search for enough cash to pay the taxi driver. It was close to midnight. Sally, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled from bed, had to come downstairs in her floppy bunny slippers and search her purse while the driver waited in the hallway with Jill sniffing curiously at his trouser leg and Number Five growling at him from a safe distance. Finally the money was scraped together and a receipt was written out in exchange. The cab backed out of the driveway and the rattle of its diesel engine quickly faded into the night. The silence of the countryside descended round the house.
‘Where’s the car?’ Sally asked.
‘A minor accident,’ Fyfe replied, not wanting to have to explain. ‘Nothing serious but I may have bent an axle by running into a flower bed.’
‘Are you all right?’