So, thought Sussock, as he stood beside the second officer of the mobile patrol, sometime in the night a man or a woman, but probably a man, had run down the alley in a state of panic, and on reaching Renfield Street might have turned left or right, but might equally have run the length of the alley, enjoying the anonymity offered by the shadows, before finally, it could be reasonably assumed, composing himself and stepping into the street lights and walking home, or taking the tube, or a bus, or jumping a cab.
He’d walk.
Sussock would have walked home, no matter where home was. If he had killed a man by stabbing him to death, and presumably getting into a scuffle in the process, then he would need the darkness in order to reach home. He would have the man’s blood on his clothes, and the man might have turned and scratched his assailant’s face and, if so, not only would he have bloodstained, sweet-smelling clothing, but he would also be scratched about the face. He would be conspicuous among passengers on the bus or the tube. A cab driver would have driven him straight to the nearest police station. If Sussock had been the murderer he would have walked home, so he reasoned it was not at all unreasonable to assume the actual murderer had walked home.
‘We found a knife,’ Sussock told the officer, breathing deeply, forcing cold March morning air into his lungs and wincing at the discomfort.
‘Really, sir?’
‘Gets us off to a good start, anyway.’ Sussock exhaled. ‘Don’t let any member of the public in or out of the lane. I’m sure you wouldn’t anyway.’
‘Very good, Sarge.’
Sussock turned and retraced his steps. Upon reaching the summit of the Lane, he noticed that a small, blue-suited Oriental gentleman had arrived at the locus and was presently kneeling over the corpse, with Hamilton and the mobile patrol officer holding up the blanket, using it as a screen to shield the corpse from view from any prying eyes on West Nile Street. Dr Chan, the police surgeon, had arrived.
Sussock approached to within ten feet of Dr Chan and then stopped, not wanting to intrude on the work of the police surgeon, or to intrude on his personal space. Dr Chan turned and smiled at Sussock.
‘Well, the young man is deceased,’ he said. ‘I can confirm death.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Dr Chan stood. ‘Death appears to be occasioned by stab wounds to the chest, but the pathologist will confirm that, or otherwise. All I can say is that he is deceased.’
‘Very good, sir. I’ll ask the pathologist to attend. Could you indicate time of death?’
‘Within hours, I’d say.’ Chan buttoned his jacket. ‘Rigor mortis hasn’t set in, but the blood is very dry, drier than it should be in the absence of rigor. Really, you’ll have to wait for the pathologist’s report.’
Sussock glanced at his watch and noted the time for his report. It was 10.15 hours.
Janet Reynolds sat at the breakfast bar in the kitchen of her home. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, attractive, sandy-haired, with a beautifully smooth complexion. She wore a full-length housecoat, carpet slippers, and she sipped her umpteenth cup of coffee that morning while she devoured the review section of the Sunday Times. Her home was a spacious, detached villa in Pollokshaws, stone-cleaned, well-maintained, and all-in-all a very desirable property. Outside, in the rear gardens, warm in jeans and sweaters, her two children romped with Gustav, the St Bernard. Upstairs in the master bedroom to the front of the house, her husband still slumbered. In the night, as often happened, he had been awakened by a phone call from the police requesting his attendance at a suspicious death. On this occasion the phone call had been made at a little after 02.00 hours, and as usual, her husband, a light sleeper, had answered the phone promptly, spoken less than he had listened, replaced the handset and rolled smoothly out of bed; he had dressed outside the bedroom so that he wouldn’t awaken her. And as also was usual, she had in fact awakened at the first ring of the phone and had none the less continued to pretend to be asleep so as not to upset him as he tiptoed out of their bedroom with a bundle of his clothing in his arms. She had, as was her habit on such occasions, lain awake as the silver Volvo, with her husband at the wheel, had reversed down the drive, crunching the gravel insisted on by her husband because it was a good burglar deterrent, whining in reverse gear. She had lain in bed listening to the vehicle drive away; first, second, third, fourth gear; always amazed how far sound seemed to travel at night. Only when she was sure that her husband had rounded the distant bend of their road did she turn on the bedroom light.
Janet Reynolds benefited from insomnia.
For many years she had suffered from it. For many years she felt herself to be a misfit, a freak of nature, abnormal and monstrous, because she didn’t need eight hours’ sleep each twenty-four like everybody else needed. Sometimes, in desperation, she faked it, lying with her eyes closed for six hours until she fell asleep, then slept for two and awoke fully refreshed. In times of greater desperation she attempted, and often succeeded, to induce sleep with the assistance of pills or alcohol, or sometimes, when very desperate, with a dangerous mixture of both. After such attempts she would awaken feeling like a wreck.
Her life changed for her when she was in her late teens. And it changed suddenly. She was doing nothing but walking down the street to the corner shop to buy some groceries when it occurred to her that if she did not need eight hours’ sleep every twenty-four then she just didn’t need it. Simple. It was as if a large dinner plate which had been held in front of her eyes had suddenly shattered and through the breaking shards a light shone brilliantly and she saw her way forward.
Her life changed instantly. She began to like herself and her self-image improved. Instead of seeing herself as having to come to terms with a handicap of some description, she saw herself as being uniquely privileged, believing her life to have greater longevity than most, not in terms of years but in terms of measurable periods of consciousness. She began to study, went to university, where she met the man who was to become her wonderful husband. When their children were young, she survived the very early years better than most young mothers, because she always had up to six hours to herself each and every night which were hers and hers alone, and should one of the children wake during those hours, then she was already awake, active and pleased to respond. In later years, when her children slept through to the night, she would use those hours to study for a master’s degree, which she did on a part-time basis; she devoured an enormous amount of literature and taught herself foreign languages.
That Sunday morning she had been awake for six hours before her children began to stir. Her husband slept late, having returned only at 7.30; by 10.0 a.m. the children had breakfasted, had helped with the washing up and had taken Gustav into the back garden; she had returned to the Sunday papers and to the coffee. She was a happy, content and utterly fulfilled woman.
The phone rang. Janet Reynolds extended a slender arm and picked up the wall-mounted handset.
‘Dr Reynolds,’ she said.
”Morning, madam,’ said a soft-spoken but distinctly West of Scotland female voice, ‘Controller, P Division here. Sorry to bother you on Sunday morning, but may I speak to Dr Reynolds, please?’
‘Again?’ She let the newspaper fall flat on the breakfast bar. ‘He only returned from an incident three hours ago. He’s still asleep.’
‘There really is nobody else we can ask, madam,’ said the voice with polite insistence.
‘Hold the line, please.’ She spoke sharply. She was angry, feeling as deeply the sense of injustice done to her husband as she would feel angry about an injustice done to herself. She left the kitchen, kicking a plastic toy out of her path as she did so, walked down the hall and turned up the wide staircase, turned again on the landing and softly opened the door of the bedroom which she shared with her husband. In the darkened room she saw the silver-haired head of her husband lying on the black pillow case and the sharply patterned red, black and white duvet covering his trim figure. He turned as she opened th
e door.
‘Is that for me?’ he asked.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said, softly, kneeling beside him so that her face was level with his. ‘The boys in blue for you. P Division this time. Where’s that? Down town or in the sticks?’
‘It’s in the town.’ He levered himself up. ‘Smack in the centre.’ He reached for the phone by the bed. ‘Hello, Reynolds here.’
‘I’ll grind some fresh beans and grill some bacon.‘Janet Reynolds stood and left the room. She was very proud of her husband.
Minutes later he joined her in the kitchen, dressed casually, clean freshly ironed shirt, brown corduroy trousers, soft shoes. He yawned and retied his tie. She pressed a mug of coffee into his hands.
‘More gore?’ she said.
‘Apparently so.’ Reynolds sipped the steaming fluid. ‘Dr Chan has just pronounced death on a young man of nineteen or twenty. A formality, I’d say, given that the cause of death is apparently multiple stab wounds.’
‘But that’s for you to confirm.’ She glanced out of the rear door of her house at her children and Gustav, romping playfully, safely, while a few miles away, a nineteen- or twenty-year-old lay dead of multiple stab wounds. Two worlds in the same city.
‘I’ll try and get back before midday.’ Reynolds blew on the coffee. ‘Did I hear you mention bacon?’
‘It’s grilling.’ She smiled. ‘As I’m sure you can smell.’
‘Excellent. I never like going out on an empty stomach.’
‘We said that we’d take the children to the Burrell Collection this afternoon,’ she said tentatively, sliding sizzling rashers out of the eye-level grill.
Reynolds paused. ‘I think you’ll have to go without me. I’m sorry, but that’s the way of it sometimes. You might not need your eight hours, but I do.’
Reynolds parked his Volvo close to the entrance of Sauchiehall Lane. He left his car, making a quick mental note of the temperature and the weather conditions. Later he would make exact notes, but as he walked to the entrance of the lane, towards the police car with the blue revolving lights and the uniformed constables and Dr Chan, who stood chatting to the elderly police officer. Sergeant Sussock, it was enough for Reynolds to note that it was dry and perhaps four to five degrees above freezing, no wind, therefore no chill factor to aggravate heat loss. Apparently one of the more simple scenarios. Reynolds also noticed the black mortuary van standing close by, summoned no doubt as soon as Dr Chan had pronounced death. Inside the van the driver and his mate sat with their feet on the dashboard, smoking cigarettes and each reading the Sunday Mail. It was, for them, just another stiff to be lifted from the street and taken to the mortuary, like delivering meat. As Reynolds looked at them, the driver’s mate wound down his window and tossed his fag end into the gutter.
Reynolds walked into the alley. He saw a mound covered by an orange blanket.
‘So he’s dead?’ Reynolds spoke to Dr Chan.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Chan.
‘Well, let’s have a look at him,’ Reynolds said. He had got to know Dr Chan in recent months and knew that Chan liked to stay and observe him work out of a professional interest.
Sussock peeled back the blanket and revealed the crumpled body of the youth.
Reynolds sighed. Like Hamilton earlier, Reynolds saw not just a life savagely cut short when just on the threshold of adulthood, but the sheer wasted, pale, drawn appearance of the young man. The long dirty hair, the thin dirty denims which would offer no protection in the cold, the worn training shoes with ill-matching laces. He knelt by the body and opened the front of the denim jacket and revealed the bloodstained shirt. He opened the shirt and examined the chest.
‘Stab wounds,’ he said. ‘I can see no other evident injury but I’ll test for poison as a matter of course. I think, though, that as you say, Dr Chan, the stab wounds will be the cause of death.’ Reynolds opened his bag and took a thermometer and noted the air temperature—4°C, and the time—10.37 hrs. He noted both in a small pocket notebook.
‘Could you suggest a time of death, please, sir?’ Sussock asked. ‘It would give us something to work on.’
‘Hours,’ said Reynolds. ‘Can’t be more certain than that. I think that he was murdered here, not elsewhere, because rigor is apparently just setting in and he’s in the position that he would be in if he had been stabbed and left to slump against the wall, rather than been dumped. What do you think it is, a Saturday-night knifing?’
‘Most probably, sir,’ Sussock replied. ‘Cheap and as grubby as they come. I think I’ve already found the murder weapon.’
‘Oh.’
‘A kitchen knife.’
‘The old perennial, eh?’ said Reynolds. ‘What is to Glasgow as Colt .45s are to cowboy films. If you’d bring it to the postmortem, I’ll test it on the injuries, see if it fits. I take it that you’ll attend?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Chan, ‘I have no wish to presume upon your field of expertise…’
‘Go on, please.’ Reynolds smiled. He liked Chan.
‘Well, it worries me that there is an absence of rigor when the blood seems to be days old. It isn’t fresh blood. Also, I think that if he was murdered here, there would be blood on the wall and surface of the alley, yet there is none. It is only a humble observation, sir.’
Reynolds looked at Chan with widening eyes. He nodded his head slowly.
‘A humble observation you call it, sir?’ It was Sunday, 10.45 a.m.
Chapter 2
Sunday, 13.00–17.10 hours
It was a scene that Sussock had witnessed many times before. He was in a room which had industrial grade linoleum on the floor, three blank whitewashed walls, the fourth wall being largely given over to a huge sheet of glass behind which were rows of seats staggered in raised tiers. The room was illuminated by filament bulbs encased in opaque perspex to cut out the ‘shimmer’ from the bulbs. In the centre of the room stood a stainless steel table which had a one-inch lip around the edge. It was supported by a single pedestal which Sussock knew was hollow in order to allow blood to drain away. A trolley, also of stainless steel, stood beside the table and on it lay rows of surgical instruments. On the table was the corpse which had that morning been found folded and crumpled in thin denim in an alley behind Sauchiehall Street. Now it was laid out, face upwards, arms beside the body. It had been washed down with alcohol and was now naked save for a starched white towel which had been draped over the coyly termed ‘private parts’ of the body. Dr Reynolds stood beside the table, he had a small microphone attached to the lapel of his smock. Sussock stood reverently in the corner of the room.
He was pleased that the mortuary assistant who was normally in attendance was not present on this occasion. The mortuary assistant was a small man with short, greased-down hair and always seemed to have a sinister gleam in his eyes, especially as he cast them lovingly over corpses. Sussock had always found himself unnerved by this assistant; he seemed to Sussock to be a man who loved his work in the unhealthiest of ways.
When Sussock had first married, in the halcyon days of his life when he and his wife were not just talking to each other, but were actually loving with each other, they had lived for a short while in a two apartment off London Road. In the flat above theirs had lived old Mr Duffy and his wife whom Sussock remembered fondly as a very pleasant couple indeed. Mr Duffy had been a mortuary assistant and his work had destroyed him. When Sussock had known him, Mr Duffy had been in his declining years and he lived every working moment in sheer terror of his own death. Mrs Duffy had to nurse him down the stair, coax him across the road, escort him to the pub, where she would leave him for two hours while she did the shopping and then, having taken the shopping home first, would return to the pub and coax her timid husband back into their house, where he was happy to sit so long as she was there. He was in terror of his own death because he knew, when he died, which van, driven by which man and mate, would arrive and collect his corpse. He knew which mortuary
he would be taken to, who would remove his clothing from his body and who would wash his body with alcohol solution taken from which container; who would lay him out on the dissecting table. He knew who would take which knife and who would make incisions here and here and here, and who would then peel the flesh from his face and chest. A case of a man in the wrong job if ever there was one, so Sussock had always thought. Mr Duffy, all those years ago and now doubtless long deceased, would have made a contented gardener or postman or baker, but not a mortuary assistant. Sussock could never imagine the work of a mortuary assistant would reach Dr Reynolds’s usual assistant like the work had reached Mr Duffy. Again, Sussock was pleased that that man was not present this Sunday afternoon.
‘Well, we are presented with a corpse.’ Reynolds slid a surgical-gloved hand into the pocket of his smock and switched on the tape recorder. He spoke in a normal voice, with the small microphone in the lapel of his smock recording his voice without his having to direct it sideways to the microphone. ‘And, as on all such occasions, we will attempt to determine the cause of death. The date is March 31st, the deceased, a male, is…’ Reynolds glanced at Sussock. Sussock shook his head. ‘ID to be confirmed,’ continued Reynolds, though Sussock knew that a Social Security card found in the pocket of the deceased’s jeans giving the name of one Edward Wroe and an address in Kelvinbridge seemed to be a promising lead.
‘Initially, I intend to determine the approximate time of death and then the cause.’ Reynolds lifted one arm of the corpse and let it fall on the table. He did the same with one spindly leg. He then placed his hand behind the neck of the deceased and lifted it up just an inch or two off the table. Sussock saw that the pathologist had to apply considerably greater strength to do this than it had required to lift the limbs. The neck, in contrast to the limbs, seemed stiff and rigidly attached to the shoulders. It did not hinge forward, but rather, when Reynolds lifted the neck, the upper torso also lifted from the table.
And Did Murder Him Page 2