The Bird That Did Not Sing

by Alex Gray

  The school teacher drove off, a feeling of lightness in her spirits as she contemplated the term ahead. Despite the pressure of imminent exams, she was looking forward to being with her senior pupils again and preparing them as best she could. It was warmer today, another spell of sunny weather forecast after the changeable days they had endured throughout the holidays. Once the kids were on exam leave, heads down in a final effort to gain good passes, the weather would pick up. It was the law of natural cussedness, her friend Sandie often remarked, that term-time brought the best of the sunshine while the vacations were usually damp and miserable. Still, it hadn’t all been a washout, Maggie thought. She’d managed a bit of gardening, tidying the borders before the time came to plant out the usual annuals. At least Flynn would see that she had made a bit of an effort.

  Joseph Alexander Flynn had good reason to be whistling cheerfully as he drove the green van up the Lorimers’ driveway. It was several years now since he had first stood at their door, a waif rescued from disaster by the tall detective, his feet set on a better path than the one he had followed before meeting William Lorimer. He grinned as he lifted down the mowing machine and trundled it around to the back of the house. The front garden was small and neat, easy enough for Maggie to manage, but the back was a different challenge. Here the lawn straggled over more than half their quarter-acre, the rest being given over to flower beds, shrubs and mature trees, a haven for Chancer the ginger cat, who came at that moment to greet him, tail erect, waiting for the gardener to tickle him behind his ears.

  ‘Hello?’

  Flynn stood up, surprised to hear a woman’s voice coming from the kitchen doorway. Standing just outside on the step was an elegant red-haired lady, one hand cupping her elbow, the other languidly holding a cigarette.

  This woman might have stepped straight out of a television advert, she looked so perfect. The dark trousers emphasised her slim figure and under the pale grey shirt that was unbuttoned just low enough, Flynn could see the rise of her breasts. But it was the face that cast its spell; different from the ones plastered across all those beauty magazines in the newsagent’s where he bought his daily paper, this face had character and experience, a knowingness in the green eyes that made the young man feel instantly aroused. She stood there letting him watch her, then smiled as though she could read his thoughts.

  ‘You must be Flynn,’ she said, and took a drag at her cigarette, blowing the smoke over her shoulder.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I’m Vivien,’ she told him. ‘Did Mrs Lorimer tell you that I’m staying with them for a while?’

  Flynn shook his head, still gazing at this unexpected vision of loveliness, all too conscious of his own grubby dungarees and thick-soled boots.

  ‘Don’t let me keep you back,’ she said. ‘Just let me know when you’d like a break, won’t you?’ she added, smiling in a way that seemed to suggest she might be offering more than tea and biscuits.

  Flynn continued to trundle the lawnmower towards the grassy areas, wondering who this woman was and what she was doing with the Lorimers.

  Vivien Gilmartin stood at the kitchen window, watching as Flynn stooped to pull the cord on the mower, then, as the machine burst into life, her gaze followed him across the garden and her green eyes narrowed as an idea took root in her mind.

  If Joseph Alexander Flynn was surprised to see the woman kneeling by a flower bed, hands safely protected by Maggie’s gardening gloves, he did not show it. She didn’t look the type to get her hands dirty, but appearances could be deceptive, as Flynn knew only too well. Besides, a little weeding would not go amiss, and perhaps this Vivien person wanted to be helpful to the Lorimers, he thought, concentrating on his own task as the red-haired woman bent over, the small gardening fork digging deep into the crumbly soil.

  ‘Twenty thousand pounds,’ Wilson said.

  He was sitting in Lorimer’s office, sun streaming through the slatted blinds, the detective superintendent leaning back in his seat behind his desk, fingers steepled against his lips.

  ‘That’s a lot of money. And the press release? When does it go out?’

  ‘Tomorrow. With the mention of a substantial reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. I can just see the headlines now,’ Wilson sighed. ‘Impresario poisoned in city flat.’ He shook his head. ‘Poor chap. And he was in the running for a knighthood?’

  ‘That’s what Mrs Gilmartin told me.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to stay any longer,’ Wilson said. ‘The Fiscal reckons we can release Gilmartin’s body for burial down south.’

  ‘Burial. Not cremation?’

  ‘Oh no.’ Wilson smiled thinly. ‘You never know when we might need it again.’

  ‘I’ll tell Mrs Gilmartin tonight,’ Lorimer said.

  Wilson nodded. Mrs Gilmartin. Not Vivien. The detective superintendent was saying and doing all the right things; his involvement was as a witness and a friend of the widow, yet there was no real warmth as he spoke, making Alistair Wilson wonder if his news came as something of a relief. He remembered the proprietary way that Vivien Gilmartin had ushered them into the Lorimers’ home, nothing that he could have put his finger on, simply a feeling that still rankled. He hid a grin as he left the office, pausing to throw one last remark over his shoulder.

  ‘Bet Maggie will be glad to get the house back to just the two of you.’

  ‘You’ll be glad to see the back of me,’ Vivien declared, turning to see Lorimer standing in the doorway of her bedroom. The bed was strewn with clothes and shoes, far more than she had arrived with on the night of her husband’s death, Lorimer having made several trips since then to collect her possessions.

  ‘Not at all,’ he protested, attempting a sincerity that he did not feel. It would be a huge relief to have his visitor leave; the growing tension between Maggie and himself was becoming almost unbearable. Ever since the night when Vivien had woken from that nightmare, crying out his name, Lorimer had felt an unspoken resentment emanating from his long-suffering wife.

  ‘You will come to Charles’s funeral?’ she asked him suddenly, looking down at a dark dress folded across her arms.

  ‘Of course,’ he told her. ‘If I possibly can.’

  ‘It would mean a lot, William,’ she said, using the name that he had left behind at school.

  Lorimer nodded. ‘I’ll be there. Just give me plenty of time to make arrangements.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Vivien whispered. ‘I couldn’t have made it through these last few weeks without you.’

  ‘And Maggie,’ he chided gently.

  ‘And Maggie, of course,’ she said lightly, though in a tone that made Lorimer wonder if there was something between the two women that he ought to know.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  May 2014

  There was something she ought to know, something she wanted to know, a feeling like a pain gnawing away at her insides that Shereen recognised as a guilty conscience. What had happened to the other girl? It was weeks ago now and she’d been told in no uncertain terms to keep her big fat mouth shut, or else.

  Shereen still remembered the night when the girl they had called Celia had tried to escape from the flat, her tear-stained face turned to the older woman, eyes pleading for help. Then the door had banged shut, the footsteps receding until she could hear no more, only the distant sound of a car revving up on the street below.

  Since then she had scanned every newspaper she could find, sitting for ages in the library or nursing a mug of coffee in Starbucks, but no report had ever appeared about the missing girl. Perhaps, Shereen thought, they had sent her back home; but she was only deluding herself with such hopes, she knew that. They had done something to Celia, something bad. She had seen the way the two men refused to meet her eyes later that night, a sure sign of their guilt.

  ‘Just look after Asa,’ one of them had told her gruffly when Shereen had dared to ask about the other Nigerian girl. ‘You do your job and we’ll do ours,’
he’d said, his voice low so that the other man would not overhear him. ‘Know what happens to a singing bird?’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Shereen shook her head. What the hell was he talking about?

  The man looked at her intently, fingers rolling a folded newspaper.

  ‘A singing bird is never allowed to live. Everyone knows that,’ he whispered, twisting the paper slowly until it began to tear at the edges.

  Shereen had shivered, hands covering her throat in a protective gesture.

  Soon afterwards Asa had appeared to take the other girl’s place and Shereen recalled the way the young girl had smoothed the cover on the bed as though she had sensed someone had been there before her. Watching her grow in confidence had given the big woman a spurt of pleasure, enough to put Celia out of her mind, for now at least.

  There had been a few clients climbing these tenement stairs now, Asa silently enduring their overtures; no doubt the pills she’d been given helped to put a veneer on these sexual encounters. Shereen had washed the bloodstained bedding after her first night, the girl’s stolen virginity clear for anyone who cared to see. She’d had to do the same the morning after the big man had satisfied his lust in an attempt to purge the memory of whatever he had done. Asa’s eyes had been dull as she’d sat fidgeting at the breakfast table and there had been no exchange of words between them. It was as if her spirit had been broken in some way, and the older woman had longed to take the girl into her arms, soothe her with false hopes. But she had done neither of those things. Shereen was a part of the young Nigerian girl’s pain, powerless to prevent it happening, and she hated herself for it.

  Professor Solomon Brightman turned the page of the book he was reading, then put his hand back against his chin, a thoughtful look on his face. Nobody had invited him to do this background research, no pay cheque would tumble through his letter box with a thank-you letter from the police, but nevertheless he had decided to look into what he could find about child trafficking. One author had suggested that the statistical rise in such activity coincided with major events in or around the cities where trafficking took place and Solly’s interest had been piqued.

  It was now May, and the Commonwealth Games were a matter of weeks away. Glasgow was filled with colourful signs. Everywhere he went there were posters and banners with the ubiquitous kilted mascot grinning from each and every one of them. At first the psychologist couldn’t help but grin back; the whole city seemed to be filled to the brim with a sort of wondrous anticipation. Don’t knock us! We’re as good as the rest of them! these banners seemed to be saying, and it was true. The news filtering out from the 2014 committee was all good. The athletes’ village had been completed to the highest of standards and would help in the regeneration of Glasgow’s East End; figures were already suggesting that tourism to Scotland was expected to achieve an all-time high and the number of Games workers in paid employment just kept rising and rising.

  It was hard, therefore, to imagine a darker undercurrent to this city he had grown to love, a seamier side where underage girls were groomed to satisfy the sexual lusts of those visitors who were looking for a good time in more ways than one. Solly had even spoken to a psychologist friend who worked at the detention centre where illegal immigrants were placed prior to being repatriated to their homelands. His friend had some concern about a young African girl. Hints about an organisation had been given, no more than mere rumours, she had told him. Nothing substantial, no evidence that was worth taking to the authorities. But she was sure that something was happening, and Solly believed her.

  Across the city Acting Detective Inspector Alistair Wilson stared at the latest report sheet on his laptop and swore under his breath. Nothing was coming right in this case, nothing at all.

  ‘Evidence, we need some evidence,’ he muttered darkly. But each time his team had come back empty-handed from the flat, the neighbours round about and the theatre where Gilmartin had spent his last afternoon. He had nourished hopes of a breakthrough when the tox report had mentioned the ginger wine.

  ‘It’s dark and sickly sweet,’ he’d told his colleagues, ‘a perfect base in which to mix a cocktail of drugs.’ The fact that it was normally a seasonal drink, found in the shops for New Year’s celebrations, had presented some difficulty, though when his wife, Betty, had reminded him that a cordial could be purchased to make the stuff at home, Wilson had become more positive. ‘If we find the bottle, we can test for prints,’ he’d told the team. But a careful search of the premises had produced absolutely nothing: no half-empty bottle, not even one that had been emptied then washed. Like many city flats, the one rented by the Gilmartins had a chute for rubbish, the large bins in the basement being collected on a weekly basis. Unluckily for the investigating team, the collection had taken place the Monday after Gilmartin’s death, so there was nothing at all to show if a bottle had been disposed of in that way.

  ‘Maybe they brought it and took it away again,’ McEwan had suggested, after one discussion about whether there had been more than one person involved in the murder. Wilson had merely grunted and gone back to the laborious work of finding CCTV footage in the area round about.

  But here again he had drawn a blank. No images of Charles Gilmartin in the company of other people appeared in the grainy videos, just one of the man entering the building alone at six minutes past six, the time duly noted in Wilson’s report. He must just have missed his wife, as she had left round the back of the flats by taxi, though no CCTV footage covered that part of the complex. But Gilmartin couldn’t have spent the rest of the evening on his own, Wilson thought, despite the fact that no other figures had been seen following him, none but the residents who lived there and, much later, Mrs Gilmartin herself. But by that time, he was dead, Wilson reasoned. There were no internal cameras to snoop along the corridors or the lift and so he’d had to think of other ways a killer might have entered the building. Or had he been there all along? Were they looking for another resident, perhaps? But a door-to-door trawl had come up with nothing, most of the residents having sound alibis for their whereabouts on a Friday night, while those who had been on their own, like the eighty-five-year-old lady downstairs, appeared from the further checks that had been carried out to have no reason to poison the impresario.

  And despite the dangling carrot of a reward, the press release had only brought time-wasters into their orbit.

  It was more than puzzling, Wilson had confessed to his wife; it was frustrating, especially as this was a case where he had been appointed SIO and solving it might lead to a late promotion, something he and his wife had dreamed about for long enough now. The extra money in his pension would be a boost when he retired.

  ‘What about the wife?’ Betty had asked. ‘Isn’t poison supposed to be a woman’s weapon?’

  Wilson had shaken his head. They’d been sitting in front of the TV, Betty watching her favourite television adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, when she had made the comment.

  ‘She’s got about a hundred alibis for the time of her husband’s death,’ he told her grumpily. ‘Lorimer included.’ And Betty had shrugged, said oh well, and continued to stare at the screen.

  It was Kirsty who had posed the other question, one a cop would ask: who benefits from his death, Dad? And he’d told her. The sole beneficiary in Gilmartin’s estate was his wife. No children, no previous marriage, nobody else who would inherit what was an astonishingly large amount of money. He remembered how Vivien Gilmartin had shrugged as though she were completely indifferent to such wealth. ‘How can I enjoy it on my own?’ she had asked him, her fingers reaching for another handkerchief from the box thoughtfully provided by Maggie Lorimer. And Wilson had nodded, silently thinking of how he would feel if it had been Betty. His world would be empty without her, and no material benefit could ever compensate for that kind of loss.

  Now he was staring at his screen again, trying to work out who could have possibly entered the flat that night, a niggling voice telling
him that this was one case that might remain unsolved due to lack of evidence. He’d be branded as a complete failure, but worse than that, he would be letting down the detective superintendent, a man he considered his friend as much as his colleague, and that rankled more than anything. Tomorrow he would be heading down to London in the hope that some of Gilmartin’s theatrical colleagues might throw some light on to why this man had been killed. The thought of the long rail journey and nights spent in a cut-price hotel depressed him. This should be a job for someone more senior, he told himself, not for a DS who had begun to count the time until retirement.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ‘Why not?’ Rosie asked her husband as she lifted a pile of Abby’s clothes from the tumble dryer. ‘Lorimer wouldn’t mind, I’m sure of that.’

  ‘But the Chief Constable might,’ Solly murmured, thinking of the budgetary constraints of policing. Hiring a profiler for the case of one unidentified girl was very unlikely indeed.

  ‘Well, you aren’t looking for remuneration, are you?’

  Solly smiled, his brown eyes twinkling through the horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I just want to let him have a few facts. Perhaps his team already knows about it, though. I might look a little foolish. As if I were teaching my grandmother how to suck eggs.’

  ‘If I were that girl’s mother, I’d want every single fact laid out before the police, no matter where it came from,’ Rosie told him. She sighed. ‘Poor wee soul. More than likely her parents sold her to buy basic essentials. We don’t know how fortunate we are in this country,’ she added, looking at all the little garments on her lap. Abigail Margaret Brightman was spoiled for choice when it came to wee dresses and cute outfits, partly because her godmother, Maggie Lorimer, couldn’t resist passing the window of the Monsoon children’s department and often brought Abby a new frock with matching tights or a patterned cardigan. Then again, Rosie herself liked to browse the internet for new clothes for her little daughter. For an instant she felt a pang of guilt; the amount of money this pile of clothing folded on her lap had cost would feed several African families for a year or more.