He took his purple shellsuit out from the satchel, pulled it on over his bloodstained clothes, shoved the ropes, knife and syringe into it, and headed out of the front door, which he left unlatched.
No mess.
EIGHT
‘So, did you find what you were looking for?’
They stood on opposite sides of Parlabane’s one hundred per cent furniture-free kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil.
‘You know, before I even think about answering that question, I think I should get a reply to the “Who the fuck are you” one.’
Sarah felt the confidence of being behind a mask. There was always an unreality to the sudden death of someone you knew, this time doubly so due to it having been murder. There was a feeling of the rules having been suspended, a grace period during which you were someone else until you were ready to resume being yourself and accept the responsibilities ahead. The shock, the jolt gave a hazy sense of control having been lost, and the appearance of a mysterious stranger together with the promise of other knowledge had drawn her, like an open door on a train pulling away from the platform, headed for an unknown destination.
‘Sorry,’ said Parlabane. ‘My name’s Jack. Jack Parlabane.’
‘I didn’t ask your name, I asked who the fuck are you. I feel pretty sure you’re not a cop, and I came up here in the fervent hope that you’re not just a nosy neighbour.’
Parlabane chucked his jacket on the worktop and spooned powder into a suspiciously murky cafetière.
‘I could be the killer. Didn’t that occur to you?’
Sarah sniffed dismissively. ‘No you couldn’t. From what I gather, the killer got the better of Jeremy after a real ruck. Nothing personal, but you don’t look up to it. You’d have to be a lot bigger, a lot stronger and probably a lot fitter. So one more time, who the fuck . . .’
‘I’m a journalist.’
Sarah rolled her eyes. His intriguingly mercurial look had just become probing and seedy. Reality was starting to precipitate in a sordid grey.
‘Fuck your coffee. I’ll take my chances with the police.’
Jesus, thought Parlabane as she made to leave, Rupert Murdoch had a lot to answer for.
‘Wait,’ he called after her. ‘Two things you ought to know. One, I’m not that sort of journalist.’
She kept walking down his hall. ‘What sort of journalist is “that sort of journalist"?’ she muttered.
‘The sort it would be wise to walk out on without hearing what he had to say.’
She stopped with her hand on the lock.
‘I’m not after you for a story,’ he assured her, hands in the air. ‘At least, not the kind of story you’re worried about.’
‘All right. Milk, no sugar.’
She walked back to the kitchen behind him. He was actually a couple of inches shorter than she had first thought, his initially menacing stance lending him stature. He looked very light-framed but not skinny, like a lightweight boxer, and the black leather belt fastened tight round his waist seemed to pull the denim neatly around his well-formed buttocks. An endless parade of flabby arses presented to the surgeons for abscess removal had taught her great appreciation of a nice bum when she saw one.
‘What’s your connection to the late doctor?’ he asked, pushing down the plunger on the dark liquid. ‘Ex-wife, ex-girlfriend?’
‘Ex-wife. How did you guess?’
‘Well, no offence, we all grieve in different ways, but you’re not quite crying buckets over there.’
‘Cried my last tears over Jeremy a long time back. We broke up more than a year and a half ago.’
Parlabane handed her a mug of steaming coffee.
‘Afraid it’s UHT. No fridge yet.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said and took a few sips.
She sighed and put the mug down on the worktop.
‘Sarah,’ she said. ‘My name’s Sarah.’
Parlabane nodded acknowledgement over the brim of his mug. They stood quietly drinking for a few moments, exchanging brief, assuring smiles, aware of the almost bizarre awkwardness of their situation. Sarah looked younger than Parlabane, about twenty-seven, twenty-eight, he figured. He instinctively began piecing her together. Young to be divorced, divorced from a doctor . . . chances were she was a doctor too. Female doctors had the highest divorce rates of any profession in the country. English accent with Scottish inflections meant she probably studied up here – Edinburgh or St Andrews – met the ill-fated Dr P and stayed on. He couldn’t be sure though. From what he could remember, Edinburgh was full of natives who spoke with that anonymous, Home Counties BBC accentless English accent, and who got very shirty and upset when you asked where they were from down south. To them, theirs was a Scottish accent, just a more refined one than the rather rough and coarse vernacular favoured by the lumpen proletariat. In Parlabane’s more militantly Glaswegian moments, this pissed him off no end.
Sarah had fine, wispy, shoulder-length red hair, worn straight, framing lightly freckled pale skin which bore no make-up. She was in black jeans and a black, blazer-style jacket, on top of a white cotton button-up blouse, the kind it had taken Parlabane years to discipline himself not to try and peek through.
‘So have the cops had you in yet? Fishing for background on your ex?’
‘Briefly. Miserable-looking sod called McGregor and a big drink of water named Gow. But either I couldn’t tell them much or they weren’t asking the right questions. Probably thought they would get better information from his current girlfriend.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Oh, some nineteen-year-old nurse with blonde hair and big tits, someone happy to suck his cock metaphorically as well as literally.’
‘Was she anything to do . . .’
‘With the divorce?’ Sarah laughed. ‘Oh God, no.’
‘Then why so bitter?’
‘Disappointment, really. The embarrassment of having been married to someone who has turned out to be . . . oh, never mind. You don’t know doctors much, do you?’
‘Guess not. Apples are an important part of my daily diet.’
‘Wise man. And trust me, meeting them in a social capacity is often worse than having to meet them in their professional capacity.’
Parlabane looked her in the eye. ‘And what about meeting them in a just-trespassed-on-the-ex-husband’s-murder-scene capacity?’
She took her time swallowing a mouthful of coffee, playing calm but buying a moment to silently recoil.
‘You’re very perceptive. You should be a journalist.’
‘Maybe some day. So the nurse . . . they weren’t living together, so how long . . . ?’
‘Couldn’t tell you precisely. More than six months, I know that. It’s a familiar scenario, suits someone like Jeremy down to the ground. Worshipful girlie he can pick up and play with when he wants to, then put back down when he’s finished. And believe me, she’d have put up with it, no matter how long it stayed that way. There’s legions of young nurses in that position. White Coat Syndrome, their peers call it. Ego-massage and fuck-therapy for the dashing young doctor, lying back and thinking of some suburban two-kids-and-a-volvo dream he’s going to make come true. Sad cows.
‘The cops won’t have got much out of her. Jeremy would never have let her close enough. She won’t know a great deal more about him than that he drinks in Montmartre’s, plays rugby on free Saturday mornings and says “Oh Jesus” a lot when he comes.’
‘Present tense,’ Parlabane said.
Sarah made a self-dismissive waving gesture. ‘I know, I know. A change of tense in talking about him could be the only practical difference his murder makes to my life. It’s not easy to get used to the fact that he’s dead. The change would obviously have had a more profound impact if we were still together, but as I only saw him occasionally . . . I don’t know, I never felt like I missed him, so I was very much used to him being out of my life already.’
‘So if you were used to him being out of your life,
what were you looking for downstairs? Family heirloom? He still owe you money?’
She smiled sadly to herself, thoughts Parlabane could but guess at.
‘Oh, he owed me plenty of money, but that was written off way back. I suppose I was looking for an ending. I had got Jeremy out of my life and out of my head, but deep down there’s still a lot of loose ends, questions I intended to seek answers for when a lot more water had passed under the bridge. Maybe a few more years down the line I thought I would be able to look at him and know a bit more about what went wrong between us.
‘But on the other hand his death somehow didn’t surprise me, and that’s what makes it feel even emptier. As if I should have known. As if I did know it was coming but just didn’t anticipate precisely when or how. But that’s probably because, if you like, he was already “dead” to me in a way. I’m not known for great psychic awareness. Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted to say goodbye.’
‘Where’d you get the keys?’
‘He gave them to me. Foisted them upon me in fact. He was always losing keys when we lived together. Often turned up on a ward or outside a theatre looking for mine after finding himself locked out. So once he was out on his own, if he lost his keys he was stuffed. He asked me to keep a set at my flat that he could collect as a back-up. It was really just a ploy, an excuse to show up, a way of keeping my door open in case he needed something else. I know that because although he was bound to have kept locking himself out, he never once came round for them.’
Sarah put her mug down, emptied but still slightly steaming. By her folded arms, Parlabane knew it wasn’t just the coffee that was finished.
‘So what’s your role in all this?’ she asked. ‘I’m assuming you’re after more than the “dead doctor’s sex secrets”, so what’s the story? And come to think of it, you said “two things” earlier and never told me the second.’
Parlabane put his own finished mug down and took a deep breath.
‘Can I trust you?’ he asked quietly.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she said. ‘That’s your call.’
‘All right, scratch that. I’m going to trust you. I saw the place downstairs, before the police had cleared up. I saw the wreckage. I saw the body.’
He swallowed, nervously. He was about to turn her world upside down, black into white, light into dark, and she had no idea what was coming. He knew it was not entirely fair to share out such a burden without really waiting to be asked, but he needed her help and the best way to get it was to make her need his.
‘I believe your ex-husband was murdered.’
She closed her eyes for half a second, then opened them to reveal a bemused stare.
‘I don’t want to injure your professional pride here,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you’re going to be able to claim that as an exclusive. I think maybe even the Lothian and Borders have scooped you on this one.’
Fuck.
Sometimes he wished a sub-editor could give his speech a once-over before it was issued.
‘I’m not finished,’ he said, trying to dig himself out. ‘I mean I have reason to think he, specifically Jeremy Ponsonby, was murdered because someone wanted him dead.’
Sarah’s eyes remained fixed, cold, on his own. She hadn’t run out screaming and she wasn’t looking at him like he was nuts. This was both a good sign and a bad sign. Good because it meant she thought he might be right. Bad for exactly the same reason.
‘Keep talking,’ she said.
‘I don’t know how much you’ve been told about how he was murdered and I don’t know how much you want to hear.’
‘Trust me, I’m not easily shocked.’
‘Fine. All right, he was badly bruised and had had his nose and both index fingers bitten off. Messy, gory, horrible and weird as fuck. But he was killed by having his throat cut. Plain and simple. Now nobody has found the murder weapon, and I doubt anyone ever will, but they’re certainly not going to turn up some kitchen knife missing from your ex-husband’s flat. I’ve had the misfortune of seeing more than one cut throat, and this one was done by someone who took pride in their work, wielding an implement designed with just such a purpose in mind. It was a clean, deep, practised cut with an extremely sharp and probably pretty large blade. No hacking, no slashing.
‘Whoever killed your ex-husband has killed plenty of people before, and although the recession has hit us all, I find it hard to believe someone of his skills is having to supplement his income with burglary.’
Sarah squinted as if at too-bright light, too much information coming in at once.
A question came along to buy her time to assimilate.
‘But if he’s so efficient, what about the mess, what about the fight?’ she asked.
‘I said he was efficient at cutting throats. Getting hold of Dr Ponsonby’s must have proven more difficult than he anticipated.’
‘And where did you see all these cut throats?’
‘A live-action version of the Journal of Wound Care. AKA Los Angeles. I worked there as a reporter for the best part of two years.’
‘But why didn’t the police notice this? Why only you, or are you just Mr Hot-shot.’
‘The police saw a burglary. They saw a chaotic mess. They saw a giant turd on the mantelpiece. Whether they also saw what I saw . . . they still have to pursue the more obvious line of investigation. That’s incumbent upon them. I mean, yes, there is a possibility that the killer was a burglar who got very lucky with a kitchen knife. I can afford to look into the other possibility and be wrong. They can’t. I’ve got a contact on their side. I’ll tell her what I think. She can then tell McGregor if she buys it. From there it’s his call.
‘One of them saw it though, I’m sure,’ Parlabane said. ‘The contact, DC Jenny Dalziel. She wasn’t buying the burglary story, anyway. She suspects there might be more to know about the man himself. You’re the expert. What do you say?’
She held up a small, transparent-plastic tube.
‘Yeah, I’d say there might be more to know.’
NINE
‘Removing evidence from a sealed police crime scene. You’re showing prodigious potential. So what is it?’
‘It’s a plastic drug ampoule. NHS standard. The label’s been removed. I can get it analysed to find out what was in it.’
‘Jenny Dalziel mentioned that naughty doctors have been known to deal drugs, but that looks to me more a receptacle for prescribed rather than proscribed substances. What’s the deal? He was a doctor. Don’t you have these things around?’
Sarah shook her head. ‘Not at home, you don’t. You get glass ampoules which you have to chuck straight in the sin bin – the sharps bucket – when you’ve emptied them. The plastic ones can just go in any bin, but you still wouldn’t stick one in your pocket or anything. The lack of a label is very suspicious. I want to know what this was and what he was doing with it at home.’
‘The police found a needle but no syringe, so they figured the missing syringe was taken by the killer. What if the ampoule was his too?’
‘Then he’s no junkie,’ she said. ‘Smackheads don’t shoot up mid-burglary, I don’t imagine. And heroin doesn’t come in these.’
‘So what’s your angle on all this, Jack. Is it just a good story? Is that all it takes to get you involved?’
They were sitting on the bare floor in the living room, their backs to opposite walls, drinking more coffee. The room was lit by streetlights from the open-curtained window, as the only alternative was the bare bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling, which was a little oppressive and hurt the eyes at this time of night. It was almost pleasantly conspiratorial. They had grown tired of standing in the kitchen, and although the living room had no furniture either, it felt a more natural place to squat down.
Sarah was interested, concerned, maybe even excited, but too tired to exhibit strong symptoms of any of the above. She stared across at Parlabane in the half-light, that shock of fair hair occasionally falli
ng over his eyes in a way that seemed to be irritating him too much for it to be an affectation.
He had scored high marks for not saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you had to be a doctor to do that’ when she said she was an anaesthetist, and had trumped it by failing to remark at all when she told him her surname, which made her professional title Dr Slaughter.
He seemed sharp, attentive and perceptive; he listened not only to what she was saying, but what she was telling him. However, when he stared at her with those mischievous hazel eyes, she had an uncomfortable feeling of being robbed. She had no idea who he was, where he came from, what was in his past, which had made it strangely easier to talk to him initially, but there was an inescapable feeling that he was hiding something.
‘Is a good story not enough?’ he asked. ‘It’s my raison d’être, remember.’
‘I don’t know,’ she stated flatly. ‘I’m not sure who you’re asking. Is a good story not enough to explain your involvement to me, or not enough to explain your involvement to yourself?’
Parlabane shook his head and smiled, hiding.
‘Now that’s a whole other mystery: he said.
But Sarah wouldn’t back off.
‘Oh no. You don’t get to be the stranger with a past here. You’re asking me to trust you, but I don’t know anything about you. You’re sitting here in a flat without furniture, for God’s sake. What are you actually doing here?’
‘I’m here because it wasn’t wise to stay in LA any more.’
‘And why were you in LA?’
‘Because it wasn’t wise to stay in London any more.’
‘And what were you doing in London?’
‘Wasting my time.’
Sarah smiled, but it was not a happy smile. ‘You know, every day I find myself running round in circles with a patient because there’s something they don’t want to tell me. But I get it out of them eventually through tedious perseverance. I have to. It’s my job. I’d imagine yours is a lot like that too.’
Parlabane nodded.
Quite Ugly One Morning Page 6