The Suffering of Strangers

by Caro Ramsay

  ‘The Pond, is that anything to do with the Blue Neptune?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a small cocktail bar at the back. It’s quite exclusive.’ She looked at Costello, wondering how somebody like her knew about it.

  ‘I’ve arrested a few guys in the toilets,’ lied Costello in answer to the unasked question.

  ‘Well, Janet was working there until the bosses found out and then she was asked to move on. Then I heard she was pregnant and I thought, well, that will be her, you know, out the game.’

  ‘Not hostessing or …’

  ‘Or just get rid of the baby.’

  ‘Occupational hazard in the world of hostessing?’ asked Costello, trying to keep the sarcasm from her tone.

  ‘Maybe.’ Suzy wriggled forward on the couch. ‘But she said to me that it was the best thing that had ever happened to her. And that she was going to earn a fortune.’

  Costello felt her heart jump, and resisted the urge to rush the next question. ‘What? Did she say how?’

  ‘Not specifically but I think she was talking about … well, somebody wanted a baby and … well she said why not. She mentioned thousands of pounds, thousands and thousands of pounds.’ Her envy was obvious.

  ‘Selling it?’ Costello tried to keep her voice calm.

  ‘She didn’t say exactly, but I think so. She was off work for a while. Then I heard she had been found dead in a bedsit.’ Suddenly Suzy looked young and vulnerable.

  ‘Why did you not come forward?’

  ‘Libby said I was to wait until you came to me.’

  ‘Has anybody ever approached you to carry a child?’

  Suzy recoiled in horror. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  It had taken Costello forty minutes to track down the port-mortem reports she was looking for, O’Hare had been helpful but distant, as if he was too tired to be bothered with it all. But as she gave him more details he admitted he did recall the case, for one good reason. His colleague’s comments over lunch that she had just done an autopsy on a woman who seemed to have given birth, lost the baby, then stitched herself up.

  ‘And that’s not something you hear every day.’

  Costello made an involuntary squeaking noise. ‘So we are looking for a medically trained contortionist with little maternal instinct?’

  ‘I don’t know, there was a rush put on it by the fiscal, so somebody has walked this road before you. Good luck.’

  And that had sparked her interest. If there was a fiscal out there suspecting criminality, then her life could get much easier. She flicked through the report sitting in her office, late, accompanied by a packet of Liquorice Allsorts. Janet Gibson had decided her name was not sexy enough, so she became Sonja. She noted the stomach contents listed as they had been at the time of the post-mortem: Devon Crab, deep fried seaweed and tofu curd. Not the average Glaswegian fayre. Devon crab was expensive stuff. She presumed the pathologist had tested to try to ascertain where the deceased had eaten their last meal. The food was largely undigested, so she had died a short time after, which might explain why this report had been scanned in at the front of the file.

  She clicked on to a colour picture of Janet lying on the slab, looking rather thin-faced and a bit piqued at being dead. The next click brought up the same picture that Libby had in her drawer.

  Costello scanned the report, picking out bits and scribbling them down. Janet had not been an active sex worker. She was well nourished, not a drug abuser, her death had slid past the pathologist as Janet had given birth recently, and fatality from post-birth embolism was not unheard of. The red flag for Costello, and maybe the mysterious fiscal, was the lack of a baby. There was a suggestion it had been stillborn but only because it was absent, which was an arse for elbow way of looking at it.

  Janet was ripe for the taking; bright, overworked at uni and had no close family. She had nobody at all. And, noted in bold, the door of her bedsit had been locked from the inside so the attending police officer had deduced suicide or natural death.

  Costello wasn’t aware that cause of death was now in their remit but she believed in ‘live and learn’.

  Even the length of the post-mortem report was cursory. Costello started clicking through the images, the good clean images of the crime scene that she had seen earlier. Janet was in bed, dead. It was a PC Maria Delany who was first on the scene, a quick check showed she was a constable on the south side. A new graduate who seemed to have taken a lot of it on herself.

  There was a sense of presumption in the report that Costello didn’t like. Janet was not a prostitute, the pathologist twice reported that it was unlikely Janet was a sex worker yet there was a derogatory tone to the language that didn’t belong in any murder report. Except there was no sign she was murdered.

  The report went back to the fiscal, V. Abernethy. And it ended there.

  She clicked back through the images of the room, a typical Southside lower end of the student market bedsit. A thin, badly stained beige carpet covered three quarters of the floor, leaving a wide strip of blue curled lino along the wall at a kitchen unit. A small flat-screen TV, a brightly patterned rug, a jug of water beside her bed and her iPod still sat in its black cradle with the green light on, showing it was powered up when the photograph was taken. Costello felt her heart sink, these little things, her iPod had still been alive when she had not.

  Above the bed was a calendar with May showing a golden retriever puppy looking impossibly cute. She noted the date of the death. Sixth of May 2016. Only last year but she had no memory of it. The wall had recently been painted in a futile attempt to cover the bright yellow wallpaper with its large black flowers, with light cream paint but the pattern underneath was already showing through.

  The room said a lot about her. Not a pleasant room. Delany’s report showed she was thinking death from natural causes straight away. A dangerous think for a young cop to think and a stupid thing to write down. But Costello knew the type. Delany had been qualified a fortnight, looked her seniors straight in the eye and pronounced a natural death obviously. Because she had wanted to get off duty.

  Costello had had it rammed into her as a PC, that there was only one chance at the evidence. She found herself looking at the big window in the photographs, a modern window in an old bedsit flat one floor up. By law, it had to open far enough to let an adult out in the event of a fire.

  Or if you needed an exit after locking the door from the inside.

  She clicked on through the pictures. The camera had moved to the exterior of the room now, showing the narrow landing where the cord carpet beneath a pair of visible boots was worn to a thread.

  Then there was the body, Janet lying in her bed, staring at the ceiling as if she was thinking about getting up, just contemplating the day and wondering if she could have another five minutes before the alarm went.

  If Janet had been a student at the university there would be friends, tutors, counsellors that would spend the rest of their lives wondering if there was something that they should have said, or done. Questions that will not have been asked. Or answered. While Delany had been happy to stand outside looking at her watch.

  There was a photograph of the crime scene manager, his face visible as he came up the stairs, phone clamped to the side of his head. There was the outline of a clipboard held in someone else’s arm, marking the arrival times and the identities of those attending the scene.

  The body had been found by the landlord after concerns raised by the guy in the next room. Adele 21 had been playing continuously all night. So he had chapped the door, but Janet had not responded. The neighbour only knew her to say hello to on the stairs. Janet had kept herself to herself as was the way of bedsit land. And it was not unusual for her to play music late into the night but this was louder and later than usual, and she had been very quiet recently. So much so he thought that she might have been away, so did the landlord. Somebody had been careful enough to write that – away. Away to have her child?

  The landlord ha
d been called, he had a master key and together they found her body.

  Costello looked at the images, willing Janet to tell her something. She had a growth of dark root at the top of her head, Costello knew pregnant woman stopped putting peroxide on their hair. She saw a few books stacked under her bedside light, Der Antichrist: Fluch auf das Christentum. Neitzsche. She wore red and white pyjamas, cheap nylon with the words, I want it all over the top. Costello examined the date on the puppy calendar again. Dates marked off with a cross in a thick black pen, the day before she died was marked with an asterix. Was that her due date?

  So where was the baby? Foundlings were front page news these days; people do not have psychotic breaks quietly. And, she read the small footnote, Janet had no food in that bedsit. She hadn’t been living there.

  She flicked back to the name of the fiscal who had requested the reports. V. Abernethy? She googled her and stared for a long time at the picture of the young, dark-haired lawyer. And the pretty silver butterfly necklace that hung round her long, feminine throat.

  Then she googled five of the most expensive restaurants to see which ones served Devon Crab. At least the answer to that cheered her up.

  TEN

  Friday 13th October

  ‘I haven’t seen you around for a while.’ The uniform on the outer tape smiled. ‘Good to see you wrapped up, DI Costello. It’s going to be a cold one.’

  She should have known the cop on the tape but she drew a blank so she just muttered something into the scarf round her mouth. It was one o’clock in the morning, she needed to take a moment to settle herself so she stopped walking, pretending to be taking in the air and the sight of the water. To those already at the scene, it might appear as though the approaching detective was getting her bearings. She knew the scene was in good hands. O’Hare, the pathologist’s car was already in the car park. He would be keen to get the situation sorted out, time always a critical factor for a body, especially one in water. Her brain was trying to unscramble that fact. What was a body doing out here? Was it Orla?

  But this young man was looking at her, encouraging her. She had looked like she enjoyed her job, even at one o’clock in the morning.

  She lifted the tape and tucked underneath, his outstretched arm showing her the way down the path which was obvious even in this darkness. On the other side, she hesitated, thinking that she should say something to this man, something about the case. What did he know? Who was the body? Who found them? But he had let the tape drop and he had walked away.

  She walked on, digging her fists deeper into her anorak pockets, and retracted her neck into the deep collar of her scarf. There was a cold bite in the air this morning, the breeze was light but carried a nasty chill. She went on along the path in the darkness, some of it duckboarded, other parts just a less muddy track through the deeper mud. The path wound round a hedgehog house, past reed beds, before leaving the water’s edge to veer much closer to the wall under the railway line. Her progress was faltering but steady, towards the little crowd and the lights. Some people were pointing things out to the pathologist, others looking past him and at her, waiting. Maybe it was their first body. Lochwinnoch was not known as a murder capital of Western Europe. Well, it hadn’t been until now.

  She saw O’Hare point back up towards her, then a uniform came back in a hurry, almost jogging, speaking down his radio as he approached.

  ‘There’s a young woman in the water. She matches the description of a girl you have been looking for. Down there, keep to the right side of the path. She’s still in the water.’

  Costello stopped and watched him go past, wondering about a young man like that, so occupied within himself that the tragic event in the water had left him so untouched. The world had moved on, for somebody else the world had stopped.

  Poor kid, whoever they were. They had been looking for Orla unofficially, but there was no way she was a missing person.

  This was a lonely place to die, but lovely compared to the vomit-stained streets that witnessed most murders in Glasgow. Costello ran through a few scenarios in her head. This was a bird sanctuary, there would have been nobody here once darkness fell, between half six and half seven last night. Night out here in the country tends to take its time, it falls like an incoming tide, slowly and embracing. It wasn’t like in the city when the clouds gather, the buildings cut out any spreading light.

  This place would have been quiet and abandoned. She knew it was a bird-watching paradise on this side of the water and a water sports centre on the other side. If anybody was going to park up to drug deal or for illicit sex, they would drive over there. This side of the water was deserted. It was for birders and photographers. There was a car park followed by a long walk, not a drive, right to the water as there was on the other side of the loch. Which suggested she either floated across or was walked here, then killed. Dead bodies are heavy, a dead weight in fact. She had no idea if a body of water like this had a current, if it had waves or if the wind had been strong enough to move the body across.

  Costello could see more as the path widened out. She could see two crime scene guys and three uniformed constables. O’Hare was half hidden by the rise of the land, or he was standing knee deep in water. Their feet in inches of mud, they moved in slow-motion.

  As she was nearing the inner tape she looked at the sky again, it was as dull and grey as the muddy gravel path in front of her. Had they checked the weather, ordered a tent? It sounded as though the deceased was still in the water, lying in her water-logged cradle and both being manoeuvred into a plastic bag. Then the cradle was pulled clear of the water to allow the contents to settle. The bag was cut in the upper corner, then the cradle was tilted slightly so the water emptied, leaving any debris and evidence behind with the body. It was a skilled job and she didn’t want to interrupt them.

  Costello approached down the middle of the path, walking through the puddles as an act of defiance. They needed to get that tent up here, once the crime scene lights arrived, the place would light up like a stage show and the commuters on the early train would get a fright.

  ‘White female, early twenties from the look of her,’ offered O’Hare.

  ‘And how did she die?’ asked Costello, taking the shoe covers that were offered to her by the crime scene manager.

  ‘I don’t know but can you send somebody over there to block off the car park.’ He pointed across the water, then turned to Costello. ‘And you need to speak to that man there. He’s soaking wet.’

  Costello looked down. All she could see was the nacreous tangle of arms and a vast beehive of matted black hair. She was very young. And very dead.

  O’Hare, the pathologist, opened the bag up a little to let her have a better look. The body was the colour of a ghost, deadly white and the skin of her face had lifted slightly, with her huge dark eyebrows totally unaffected by the water and the process of death. It gave the lower half of her face the look of being slightly out of focus, as if she was still under the water, the shimmer blurring her lower features.

  ‘I think she was dead before she was put in the water, if that helps.’

  ‘Don’t suppose there is a phone in her pocket, no ID, nothing as useful as that?’

  ‘No, nothing. It’s her appearance that alerted us.’ The SOCO pointed to the remnants of the hair ring on top of her head, the ‘drug dealer’s doughnut’ as it was known colloquially.

  ‘And those are similar, if identical to the clothes she was wearing when she went out the window. I know it’s not protocol but let’s get Lorna to do an early ID. But it’s Orla Michaela Sheridan. I’d swear to it.’

  She turned to Eddie who was sitting watching it all, dripping on a tree trunk near the big wall that supported the high railway line, he was wrapped in a blue blanket. A young cop sat next to him, they could have been sitting there talking about the fishing. Eddie could confirm that the body had been there early the previous evening. Had there been other people about? He reeled off the names of two othe
r guys that he knew had been taking pictures too. They might have caught something.

  ‘She was further out though,’ said Eddie to nobody in particular.

  ‘Further out?’

  ‘Yes. In the picture she’s further out, under that trunk, way out there. But when I got back here, she had floated right in. I didn’t realize what it was and reached out to see, and fell in.’

  ‘And you still have these pictures?’

  ‘Oh yes. Loads of them.’

  She turned to the young cop. ‘Maybe you can go home with Eddie here and collect the pictures.’

  The young cop nodded.

  ‘Do you know these waters well?’

  ‘Not well, but yes …’ He was still shaking, either from the cold or from the shock.

  ‘Is there a current? Could she have floated across?’

  ‘At this time of year, yes. Not enough water current but there is a strong prevailing wind, hence the windsurfing.’

  ‘I think you should take this gentleman home before he gets pneumonia. And maybe get the other pictures?’

  Orla was out of the water now, nestling in her plastic crate, with her blanket of plastic body bag. She looked relieved, death had removed the cares and stresses of life. Costello had heard it many times, how the victim looked at peace – usually only to be shattered by the court case and horrific forensic detail of the act that had put them in the mortuary in the first place.

  The photographer’s flash kept going, the video camera taking it all in. She heard O’Hare shout. ‘Hey hey.’ And he directed both cameras to the girl’s flank, to her hip, to the bruised flesh. He actually stepped over the body and lifted up the edge of her sodden cardigan so they could get a better view.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Look at that, there’s a concise, distinct pattern in the hypostasis. Can you read that?’

  ‘It’s a series of squiggles? Can you get that cleaned up for me and let me have an image,’ asked Costello.

  The pathologist nodded. ‘As soon as.’

  ‘So she was lying on her side, when she died?’