And Did Murder Him

by Turnbull, Peter

  ‘Did you see them?’

  Miss McDonald shook her head. ‘I don’t see very well at the best of times. It was dark and it was raining. I couldn’t even tell if they were men or women. They didn’t speak, but they were young. They ran away very quickly.’

  Montgomerie’s jaw began to tighten. A cold anger rose in him.

  ‘I hurt myself as I fell and I couldn’t get up. I crawled over to where Sarah was and I saw that she was hurt. I crawled on to the end of the bridge and a good Samaritan was passing and he summoned the police.’

  ‘How much money was in your sister’s purse?’

  ‘About four pounds.’ She spoke in a calm and deferential manner. ‘How long will I be here? I’d like to go home.’

  ‘The hospital has made arrangements for you to spend some time in an old people’s home. They would like someone to keep an eye on you. You’re still in a state of shock.’

  ‘If they think that that is for the best.’

  Montgomerie went to the locus of the offence. The footbridge formed a high arch over the two lanes of traffic at Charing Cross. It was narrow, had railings at either side; there was no room to manoeuvre. It was the sort of route in mid-city that streetwise young women avoid for the very reason that two elderly spinsters were at present in the GRI. The bridge is convenient, very convenient in an ideal world, but in the real world it offers no escape from violent attack and for that reason and that reason alone, Montgomerie held, not many people use it after dark. He stood on the summit of the bridge and watched the cars swish beneath him and felt and heard the rain patter on the back of his jacket. He thought that the elderly Misses McDonald really had had no choice; they could hobble across the street clutching each other and perhaps make it to the far side, by hopping roundabouts, without getting flattened by a taxi, or they could hobble across the footbridge and perhaps make it without getting flattened by muggers. They had, he thought, probably done the journey between the Tabernacle and their home via the footbridge hundreds of times but eventually it had to happen, even in this city that is as safe as any other city and a far sight safer than most, despite its reputation; eventually they would be rolled by muggers. Most probably smack-heads desperate for money for more poison.

  Even Montgomerie, with his cynicism and his years of police work, couldn’t believe that people would do this sort of thing for kicks.

  He walked to the Woodlands Road end of the bridge. Two beat cops stood, their capes dripping with the rain. One cop walked along the shrub line, shining his torch amid the branches as he went, the other examined a handbag. As Montgomerie approached, he recognized the officer who was examining the handbag to be Phil Hamilton, a good man, a little pedestrian, but very thorough; a man who wrote ‘how, why, what, when, where and who’ on the first page of each new notebook, twenty-four years old, married to a nurse, or so Montgomerie understood.

  Just about to bring this up to you, sir.’ Hamilton looked up as Montgomerie approached. Montgomerie took the bag as Hamilton offered it to him. It was an old bag of good quality leather, with a velvet lining which was torn in places.

  It contained a prayer book inside which was written the name and address of the lady who was presently in the operating theatre of the GRI. There was a comb, a handkerchief and nothing else. The purse and the princely sum of four pounds that it contained and any allowance book had been taken. He handed the bag back to Hamilton.

  ‘Found anything else?’

  ‘Not a thing, sir.’

  ‘Well, get this in a plastic bag, tag it and get it to Forensic as soon as you can. They might be able to lift prints, but I doubt it somehow. Too much moisture about.’

  Montgomerie walked up Woodlands Road, car showrooms, antique shops, Asian video rental shops, kebab shops, dark empty closes, tenements with a few showing lights. He walked on to the forecourt of the all-night service station. It was busy, cars queued up at the pumps. He went to the kiosk and spoke through the grille to a tall, thin, bearded man who wore a black baseball cap. He asked the man if he’d seen anything suspicious. ‘About an hour ago, two people, young.’

  The tall, thin man shook his head. ‘I’d like to help you, sir,’ he said, ‘but young people, old people, middle-aged people, all stop here, not just motorists; pedestrians, people on the road home from the town, stop off to buy cigarettes, a can of juice, chocolate. Didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. No one excited or agitated.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ said Montgomerie. ‘A packet of mints, please.’

  Montgomerie drove back to P Division. He drank more coffee, wrote up the McDonald case, gave it an identification number. He drank more coffee and then the phone rang.

  ‘Code 7, sir,’ said the voice on the other end of the line; and seemed to Montgomerie apologetic in tone.

  ‘Details, please.’

  The details took him to a large house in Hyndland and the owner of same who was shaking with rage. Montgomerie had to concede that as Code 7’s go, this was a particularly bad incident. The thieves had gained access by smashing a pane of an irreplaceable stained glass window at the front of the house, had stolen expensive items of jewellery, clothing; they had of course stolen the video recorder and sundry other items such as cameras. They had left the house via the rear garden and had escaped the area by taking a little used access road which ran the length of the terrace. They had then apparently returned and systematically desecrated the property. They had spray-painted the walls, carved deep grooves on valuable furniture, kicked in glass panels, tipped the goldfish on to the floor, wrung the neck of the budgerigar and left the cat quaking with fear on the top shelf of the bookcase.

  ‘I’ve been violated…violated,’ said the man, shaking with rage. ‘ Violated.’

  Montgomerie left a card giving his name and his office telephone number and requested that the police be informed of any suspicious sightings. He told the householder that a representative of the Forensic Department would visit later, during office hours, to dust for fingerprints.

  They left this behind them.’ The man pointed to a rolled-up newspaper.

  ‘Certain it’s not yours?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘They probably used it to cushion themselves against the glass when they broke in. I’ll take it with me.’ Montgomerie held the paper delicately. ‘It’s what we call alien to the locus and it may contain prints.’

  ‘You can lift fingerprints from paper?’ The man seemed to be calming and began to show a keen interest in police procedure.

  ‘Yes. It’s difficult and takes time, but it’s not impossible. It’s done by a method known as the anhydrant process.’

  ‘Bloody animals.’

  It was Wednesday, 01.45.

  More mints. More coffee. Another case written up, another case given an identification number. A case file to be dropped into Detective-Inspector Donoghue’s in-tray to await attention during the working day. More coffee.

  The shift had been dross up to that point. All dross. The two old ladies wouldn’t think that they were dross and Montgomerie himself didn’t think that the incident was dross, and the home-owner who had been violated wouldn’t think that his case was dross, but if crime ranges from littering on one hand to genocide on the other, then the bulk of cases on that shift had been closer to littering than they were to mass murder.

  Not so the next incident. It was not a crime as such but it was an incident of behaviour which reached Montgomerie and was to stay with him for many, many years.

  He arrived when the smell of roast meat was fresh and hung strongly in the living-room and the woman sat sobbing on the sofa. Earlier she had been hysterical, now she was only sobbing and was able to describe the human torch dancing round the coffee table.

  ‘I said he’d stolen the Giro cheque,’ sobbed the woman, little more than a girl. ‘He said he hadn’t; I said he had; he said he hadn’t; I said he had and he had to go, we’re not married, see. This is my house and I said that he’d have to go, so he
said he wasn’t going and he fetched a bottle of paraffin from the kitchen, a big bottle, and he poured it over himself and he got the cigarette lighter my sister brought me back from Malta last year and he flicked it…held it close and flicked it…I ran for the neighbour, she’s got a phone. I phoned the police and he was still standing when the police came. Earlier he’d been dancing round the coffee table, slow like, all flames; when the police arrived he’d stopped and was standing still…and will you look at my ceiling?’

  The beat cops had shoulder-charged the man, knocked him to the floor, smothered the flames with their capes and taken him to the Western Infirmary in the police vehicle. Montgomerie called at the hospital and was shown a body swathed in tinfoil with a small breathing hole for the mouth and small slits for the eyes.

  ‘We’ll do what we can for him.’ The strikingly attractive female doctor’s eyes widened as she gazed at Montgomerie’s chiselled features, his downturned moustache and thick black hair, as in fact he had noticed women gaze at him since he was seventeen. ‘But if he survives, he might not thank us; he has third degree burns over ninety per cent of his body. If he survives he’ll only be able to sweat from his scalp and his feet. The rest of him is done to a turn.’

  ‘Even his face.’

  ‘Especially his face. It’ll take years to reconstruct a recognizable face. Or perhaps I should say a face that’s recognizable as human. Right now it looks a bit like a stuffed pepper straight out of the oven. What happened?’

  Montgomerie told her.

  ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ said the doctor. ‘What has he proved?’

  ‘What do any of them prove?’

  ‘And it’s so selfish. I wouldn’t have minded if he had been injured in an accident, but the National Health Service is bankrupt, he is going to cost us thousands and thousands to repair, and it was all avoidable because it was self-induced. All this because he wanted to prove a point to his lady-friend.’

  03.21 hours. The shift was dragging in.

  The young woman stood, naked, in her kitchen in her flat in Langside, letting the soft light from the hall illuminate the room, the sink, the pearl grey working surface, the table, the shower cubicle. She cupped both hands around the glass of milk and stared out of the window, at the rain running down the glass and the light burning in the house opposite across the far side of the black back court. She moved her head and her lemon hair wafted across her shoulders. She stepped backwards with a lightness of step and leaned against the table, the edge of the table nestling against the lower curve of her buttocks. She sipped the milk until the glass was empty and, setting the glass silently on the table behind her, returned to the bedroom, walking on tiptoe across the deep pile carpet, slid under the duvet and placed her arm around the man.

  The man grunted.

  ‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ whispered the woman. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No,’ the man murmured. ‘I was awake when you got up. Can’t seem to sleep.’ ‘Nor can I.’ ‘What time is it?’ Three-thirty.’

  ‘Still raining?’ asked Ray Sussock. ‘Still raining,’ said Elka Willems.

  Ink-black night in the city of Glasgow and still the rain fell vertically in the calm, cold April air. Montgomerie was diverted by radio to a Code 41. Like most Code 41s in his experience, he found it bloody, cheap, grubby and senseless. By the time Montgomerie arrived at the top flat of the dirty close in Priesthill, the corpse had been removed by the ambulance crew and the assailant sat, open-eyed and ashen-faced, handcuffed to a uniformed officer. The assailant was a young man of twenty, the victim was younger; the murder weapon was an ice-pick and was sticky with congealed blood inside a plastic bag in the rear of the police car. Upstairs was the widow of the murdered man, nineteen years of age, with an infant son.

  ‘What’s the story?’ Montgomerie asked of the second beat cop who stood in the corner of the room, allowing the bumbling, clumsy thick-lensed, spectacled Elliot Bothwell, forensic chemist, to photograph the locus. There was no need for him to dust for prints on this occasion.

  ‘Gentleman on the settee, he was carrying on a liaison with the lady. The deceased, the lady’s husband, came home…’

  Montgomerie groaned. ‘I see,’ he said.

  ‘It was self-defence,’ said the young man on the couch. He spoke with a timid, frightened voice. ‘He was going to knife me.’

  ‘Take him down to the police station, please,’ said Montgomerie. ‘I’ll speak to him there.’

  Montgomerie knew what would happen. He would charge the man with murder; the man’s lawyer would plea-bargain guilty of culpable homicide, didn’t intend to kill, plea accepted, given a five-year stretch in the slammer, out in three. Just in time to see the murdered man’s child start nursery school and he would henceforth be revered on the scheme as a ‘hard man’.

  Montgomerie left the flat and went down the common stair, stood in the close mouth and glanced at the hard man with a small face, a ned who’d got hold of an ice-pick and dislodged another young man’s brains from his skull. The preliminary report from the pathology laboratory would indicate the deepest and most damaging blows had been struck from behind. Some hard man. Some self-defence.

  Montgomerie looked up. Dawn was beginning to break, a crack of grey to the south, just below the blackness. The birds didn’t sing. He noticed that before. No dawn chorus if it is raining.

  He drove back to P Division. No messages in his pigeonhole. He drank a mug of coffee and decided to let the hard man from Priesthill sweat a little. It was 05.35.

  Two hours later he handed over the shift to Ray Sussock. Sussock, who had slumbered after being woken in the middle of the night, re-awoke refreshed and rested. He breakfasted with Elka Willems, hurriedly but not under pressure, he in his clothing, she in a full-length yellow towelling robe. He had a second cup of coffee while he waited for her to dress in her uniform of unflattering serge and do her hair up into a tight bun behind her head. She put on her chequered white and black cravat which was fixed at the nape of her neck by a strip of adhesive and would therefore come away easily in the hands of anyone who tried to garotte her with it. She put on her hat and twisted it on to her head and re-appeared in the kitchen; to Sussock, she looked just as breathtakingly beautiful as when she had tiptoed across the carpet, naked, a few hours earlier. They left the flat together and drove across the city to Charing Cross in the centre of town, Sussock dropping her off to walk the last half-mile to the police station itself Sussock parked his car in the car park at the rear of the police station, and entered the building. He went to his office and peeled off” his trench coat and battered trilby and left his office to go in search of Malcolm Montgomerie. It was 06.38.

  Sussock found Montgomerie, feet on his desk, arms folded on his chest, head down and snoring fit to drive the cattle home.

  “Morning, Malcolm,’ Sussock said loudly.

  Montgomerie continued to snore.

  Sussock lifted Montgomerie’s feet off the desk and shook his shoulder. ‘Come on, look alive!’

  Montgomerie shook himself awake and squeezed his eyes. ‘Sorry, Sarge, I guess I nodded off.’

  ‘I guess you did. Good job I found you and not Fabian.’ Sussock turned and walked out of the room. ‘My office in fifteen minutes. Give you time to wash the sleep from your eyes and throw some coffee down your throat.’

  Coffee, thought Sussock walking down the corridor to his office, now there’s a good idea if ever there was one. He turned into his office and walked to the window, where his locker stood. He opened his locker, took out his mug and glanced out of the window. Elka Willems was walking smartly and briskly towards the police station in good time for muster at 07.10. She was not and never had been one of the stragglers who came panting into the muster room full of apologies as the duty watch was falling in.

  Sussock mixed instant coffee with powdered milk, went to the CID rest-room and poured boiling water from the geyser into the mug, stirring the mixture as he did so; the end result at least bore a
passing resemblance to coffee. Sussock sat away from the window, observing the directive of Chief Superintendent Findlater that it does not look well for officers to be seen sitting or standing by the window drinking coffee. He scanned the early edition of the Herald which had been left in the rest-room and sipped the contents of his mug, which had a sufficiently coffee-like taste to warrant a second mugful. This he took to his office to await Montgomerie’s arrival.

  Sussock addressed himself to the Herald crossword, cracked two down, which led neatly into four across, just as Montgomerie tapped on his door, carrying an armful of files in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other.

  Take a pew.’ Sussock folded up the paper and placed it to one side of his desk. Montgomerie lowered himself into the chair which stood in front of Sussock’s desk.

  ‘So-so,’ he said, ‘it was so-so.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘One murder,’ said Montgomerie.

  ‘Only one?’

  ‘Messy. It’s the old, old story. Husband comes home and finds another man carrying on with his old lady. There’s a rammy and the husband gets an ice-pick buried in his skull. The way I’m talking you’d think they were adults, but they’re little more than children. Late teens, early twenties. The killer is claiming self-defence, but the pathologist informed us that many of the blows and certainly the fatal one fell on the back of the victim’s skull. I think he’s got some explaining to do, but anyway he’s downstairs, cautioned and charged.

  ‘Old story, as you say.’

  ‘One stolen Giro cheque.’

  ‘Malcolm, I’ll thank you not to try my patience with trivia!’

  ‘Well, it is a reported theft,’ said Montgomerie, in his own defence, and went on to tell Sussock about the man in the Western Infirmary, wrapped in tinfoil with slits for eyes and mouth and drips in his arm.

  ‘God in Heaven,’ said Sussock.

  ‘Thought it would brighten up your morning, Sarge.’ Montgomerie smiled. ‘The man’s lady-friend whose Giro it was seemed to be more concerned about her ceiling. It’s covered in a layer of reddish-looking fat.’ Montgomerie handed the file to Sussock.