Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  PETER TURNBULL

  • • •

  LONG DAY MONDAY

  1993

  Dedicated to L.C.B.

  CHAPTER 1

  Thursday, 13.05-14.00 hours

  In later years, in years of comfortable retirement, Ray Sussock would look upon the case as being perhaps the most satisfying of his career. He began with the case and he was there at the conclusion twenty-five years later, just prior to the conclusion of his own career. It would, though, be many months, if not years, before the sense of satisfaction, the sense of neatly rounding off, would settle in. At the time he found it harrowing, especially when the realization came. When the realization came he had woken up. Screaming.

  The man again noticed the car. He had first noticed it the day previous. There was nothing exceptional about it; nothing at all remarkable, nothing at all to distinguish it from many similar cars, nothing, like accident damage, to indicate its recent history. It was a Ford Escort, two years old and of Glasgow, by its plates, but more especially by the dealer’s label still in the rear window. It was parked neatly on the grass verge, off the road, and the roads were narrow in these parts; it was easy to block the red roads of Lanarkshire. But the Ford, of a green not dissimilar to the shade of the grass on which it was stationed and which allowed it to blend into the scene, was neatly parked off the road, on the verge, close to the beginning of the avenue of lime trees now, in mid July, in full foliage. The trees lined the road, closely planted, and driving between them in midsummer was akin to driving through a tunnel. The limes were a local landmark, loved by the people who lived near them and who kept their existence a jealously guarded secret. Coach trips had been known to make detours to view less than the avenue of limes near Carluke, Lanarkshire.

  At the nearside of the car was the entrance to the driveway leading to Coles Wood Farm. Beyond the car was a fence of aged wire and rotting uprights, and beyond that was a field of lush pasture, and beyond that a second similar field but of higher elevation, and beyond that was rough grazing, then the hills, and beyond the hills the wilderness which stretched forty miles to the suburbs of Edinburgh. A dangerous, unforgiving place in winter.

  At the far side of the road the ground fell into a meadow and beyond the meadow was the Clyde, not yet the murky, magnificent Clyde of the cranes and shipyard, nor the deep-water estuary scurrying south round the Tail of the Bank, but at that point a pleasant, rippling trout stream, about twenty feet wide, idyllically bounded by weeping willows amid which swallows swooped and darted. Beyond the Clyde were fields, and beyond the fields, some two miles distant, was the thundering A74; the ‘big road’, the ‘trapdoor’ route to England. By far the quickest way to leave Glasgow for England by car: open the trapdoor and fall south. It takes two hours. But here, midday, in deepest Lanarkshire, all was silent save for the uneven tickover of the Land-Rover engine, the occasional lowing of the Here-fords, and the singing of the birds.

  The man considered the car. Foreign. Foreign in the sense that it did not belong to the locality. And it had not been moved in the thirty-plus hours since he had first noticed it. He slipped the Land-Rover into first gear and drove into the entrance to Coles Wood Farm. He reached the farm buildings, parked the vehicle in the centre of the yard and entered the house. He didn’t acknowledge his wife and she didn’t acknowledge him. The smell of boiling vegetables filled the kitchen, the windows were Steamed up. The man moved with slow deliberate movements, in his own time, at his own pace. He was dressed in a blue boilersuit, and black Wellington boots splattered in a green slime which dripped liberally on the vinyl. He crossed the kitchen floor and picked the phone up.

  ‘John McWilliams,’ he said, after the preliminaries, ‘Coles Wood Farm, Lanarkshire…near Carluke…I’d like to report a car…at the entrance to my farm, it’s been there two days now. Yes, I wrote it down this morning…’ He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a creased piece of paper. He read out the registration. ‘… About an hour.’ He glanced up at the clock on the wall, a cheap plastic clock, a white surround with black numerals and hands, with a white wire running from it over the yellow-painted plaster wall. He replaced the phone and sat at the table, metal legs with a red formica top, and waited as his thin wife laid a heaped meal before him. This done, she dutifully withdrew to allow him to eat in peace. John McWilliams grappled with the knife and fork with widely extended elbows and ate in peace, with jerky stabbing movements.

  He completed his meal, tossed the knife and fork contemptuously on the plate and left the kitchen, and the house. He clambered into the cab of the Land-Rover and drove back to the entrance of the driveway, where he halted the vehicle. He stepped out of the cab and leaned against it, smoking a cigarette.

  Not a sound now. The birds were quiet; the cattle were sitting contentedly. He shook his head. No, no, he couldn’t live in the city, he was certain. He’d been there once or twice, he wouldn’t willingly go again, even if she yearned to go back. His place was in the country and if his place was here, so was hers. She knew what she was coming to; she had visited, stayed overnight once and she’d been happy enough to leave the tenements ten years ago. Can’t change her mind like that. Even if they weren’t speaking any more, so what? They’d stopped doing anything else a long time ago…She’d made her bed, she had to lie on it.

  McWilliams’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a car approaching through the limes. He tossed the cigarette down. He knew that it was the police before he saw the car. He walked to the end of the drive.

  Piper and Hamilton rode together, crewing Tango Delta Foxtrot which, under the luminous yellow flash on the sides, and the twin bubbles on the roof, was a top-of-the-range Granada, maintained in as near perfect condition as possible and quite content to be driven at 130 m.p.h. if and when necessary. Right then it was inching along at 5 m.p.h. with both Hamilton and Piper enjoying the unexpected pleasure of driving through a tunnel of limes in full foliage. Hamilton had recently been transferred to cars; usually a beat man, now he was in cars, and he found it a more comfortable existence; the action rapid. When it moved it moved like a rocket, it had a more thinking-on-one’s-feet aspect, a more rapid response aspect, than he had found in the slower-moving life of a beat cop. He liked the excitement of cars, but missed the immediacy, the being in touch with the streets, the people, of a beat man’s existence. Hamilton was finding his feet in cars, he was a slow-thinking man, slow-moving, methodical and thorough; not a man with brains that could set the heather on fire, but seen by his senior colleagues as being the solid leave-no-stone-unturned cop that is the backbone of the police force. A good man to have on the team. A very good man. He looked ahead and saw a figure in a boilersuit walk to the edge of the road and raise his hand. ‘There,’ said Hamilton.

  ‘I’ve got him,’ Piper replied testily, a little annoyed by Hamilton’s observation which he thought needless and obvious. Piper drove slowly past the Escort and pulled half off the narrow road, riding Tango Delta Foxtrot up on to the grass verge and to the far side of the entrance to the farm. He and Hamilton left the car, putting on their caps as they did so.

  McWilliams nodded to the Ford Escort, scowling, and Piper, more experienced than Hamilton, quicker-thinking, took an instant dislike to the man. Not a great dislike, but a nagging annoying dislike. He saw McWilliams as a dour hill farmer, and one who was struggling, the tear low down in his Wellington boot which would allow water to seep in and the battered thirty-year-old series two Land-Rover he drove told him that. Piper, in serge trousers, crisp white shirt and black clip-on tie, walked towards McWilliams and saw him further as a man of little personality, little ‘give’ of himself, a detached personality and cold eyes, as blue as the vast sky above and behind him, but cold, cold, cold. A man
, thought Piper, of little imagination, a man of things in their place and nowhere else.

  ‘That’s the car.’ McWilliams spoke grudgingly, unnecessarily, letting it be known that he resented the interruption in his daily routine.

  ‘How long has it been here?’ Piper took his notebook from his shirt pocket.

  ‘Two days. This is the second day. I first noticed it yesterday morning.’

  Piper wrote in his notebook.

  ‘You’ll not be needing me any more.’

  ‘If you’ll stay a little longer, sir.’ Piper spoke with polite insistence and without eye contact with McWilliams.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If you’ll remain here, sir.’

  ‘Is it a stolen vehicle?’ McWilliams changed his tack.

  ‘Aye. From the grounds of Yorkhill Hospital on Tuesday night.’ Piper fed McWilliams a little harmless information and glanced at the car. He thought it odd that the car was not abandoned like most stolen vehicles, but neatly parked, and with consideration too. Not just at the side of the road but, given the width of the road, it had been thoughtfully removed from the carriageway and parked on the verge. The doors had been locked and there was no apparent damage; even the radio had been left untouched.

  McWilliams moved grumpily to the fence, leant on it and looked out across the pasture.

  And who, Piper pondered, would steal a car in Glasgow, drive it some twenty miles out of the city and then leave it neatly parked? He glanced about him. Fields and hills, there could only be about three houses in the immediate vicinity and none of them would soil their own nests by stealing a car, driving it home and leaving it outside the front gate, even if the gate was a mile from the home itself It would be akin to a city dweller stealing a car and leaving it parked in his driveway.

  Hamilton joined Piper. ‘They’re making contact with the owner. It’ll be some time before he can recover the vehicle…’

  But Piper wasn’t listening to Hamilton. Piper was looking at McWilliams. Piper was looking at McWilliams because McWilliams was looking at him. McWilliams wasn’t looking at Piper, he was staring him. Piper had felt affronted, he had felt affronted that a man, any man, should stare at him like that: a constant unrelenting eye-fixing stare. The sort of stare which says. You don’t exist, but I’m going to stare at you anyhow. Out of uniform it would be bad enough; in uniform it was inexcusable, a direct challenge to the authority of the police. Then, suddenly, as if gaining an insight into the taciturn ways of the hill farmer. Piper realized that McWilliams wasn’t staring at him; he was communicating with him, and he was communicating a message which read, ‘Something is amiss, something bad, I think you should come and see this.’ Piper left Hamilton without speaking and, falling in with the ways of non-verbal communication of the people of the land of the red roads, he walked up the verge and stood beside McWilliams. The man turned towards the field, and nodded to the immediate foreground.

  A mound of earth, freshly dug, five feet long, two feet wide.

  ‘Wasn’t there three days ago,’ said McWilliams.

  ‘Got a spade?’

  ‘Back of the Land-Rover.’ Said in an if-you-want-it-you-fetch-it—sir, voice. Piper did so. Battered well-used spade in hand, he vaulted the fence and began to dig the freshly turned soil. He went down six inches.

  A hand. Human; female from its size and rings.

  He covered it again.

  ‘Get on the radio,’ Piper called to Hamilton as he drove the spade into the ground beside the body, as if to provide a marker. ‘Tell them it’s a Code 21.’

  Ray Sussock had been a cop for most of his working life. He’d been a butcher’s boy, he’d tended flowerbeds in a cemetery, he’d worked in the shipyards, he’d been on the dole, he’d worked in an office, he’d done his National Service in the RAF. He had enjoyed National Service, and had been unable to settle into the routine of civilian jobs following his two years in blue. He joined the police when in his mid-twenties. Now he was close to retirement and in that time, in excess of thirty years’ service, he had risen from the rank of constable to that of detective-sergeant. Often, in moments of private recrimination, he felt that he had been given the promotion because of length of service and little else, certainly not merit, certainly not for passing the sergeants’ exams. He hadn’t sat any. But after fifteen years in the CID the promotion had come suddenly and unannounced. The job he did didn’t seem to change appreciably, but he had a grander title, a modest increase in salary, he could look forward to a better pension, and most valued of all, he had an office to himself. He had personal space. A door which he could open and shut as the fancy took him.

  He had always worked shifts, and still did. The day shift until 14.00 hours, the back shift until 22.00, the night shift until 06.00, and like all officers he had his shift card, which rotated through a four-week cycle with which he could calculate the shift he’d be working on any given day in the future, any number of years in the future, because the four-week rotation rotated endlessly, unstoppably, taking no heed of Christmastide, Easter or Bank holidays. Except that in his case, in the late afternoon of his life, he had ceased calculating his shifts for more than a few months in advance. He could scent retirement, well earned and overdue. Like any cop, once he had adjusted to working shifts he found that he had a strong preference for shift work. He worked them one shift at a time until the days off, and then he wasted the days off, never seeming to do half the things he had planned to do before the shifts started again. That’s how it had gone on, week to week, month to month, season to season, year to year. He doubted now that he could adjust to a nine-to-five routine. When he was younger he resented having to work Saturday nights, and now in his late middle years he longed for peaceful Sundays at home; but more than that he longed for a peaceful home to have Sundays in. That aside, he felt something not dissimilar to privilege in being out of step with society, having free time midweek, queueless roads and shops, uncrowded pubs, a gentler feel to each midweek day if he was on a rest day.

  And he enjoyed the job, shifts or no shifts, which took him out of doors, away from the prejudice and pettiness of the office routine, like the office he had once worked in when morning coffee and afternoon tea were taken, certainly, but only upon the instruction of the supervisor whose whims meant that the breaks took place within a ‘window’ as vast as ninety minutes. But he was just seventeen then and still learning. Never again, locked in an office for eight hours a day with two dozen woodenheads and no escape. Never again. Shifts were for him; even at his age, he could cope with shifts better than he could cope with the nine-to-five. But there were drawbacks, perhaps the most agonizing being the rule similar to the rule in the television quiz game, ‘You’ve started, so you can finish,’ though in the police it is, ‘You’ve started, so you must finish.’ A cop was not guaranteed freedom upon the time expiry of his shift. If a cop picks up a job half an hour before the end of his shift he’ll finish it—eight hours later.

  Sussock glanced at the clock on the wall above the battered grey Scottish Office issue metal filing cabinet. 13.10. Fifty minutes to go. It hadn’t been a bad shift, midweek day shift, nothing major, nothing to get his teeth into, nothing that had dominated the shift; no ‘big one’. There had been boys on the run from a List D school, hanging about the bus station and found to be in possession of controlled drugs, which had been largely handled by the uniformed branch who had informed Sussock as a courtesy. There had been a mugging in a peripheral scheme, a young woman had had her handbag stolen and her money had been taken: ‘Two weeks’ social security, so it was.’ Or had she? Sussock found her too much in control, too full of indignation, to be a victim of a crime. She gave a hazy description of a man about twenty, in denims’ who had pushed her to the ground and had run away with her handbag, and money. The incident had happened in broad daylight in the street but no witness had come forward. Sussock had been deeply suspicious, a suspicion largely confirmed when the woman had asked for a ‘pink slip’. ‘The soc
ial won’t replace the money, but, unless I have a pink slip, but.’

  But he had given her a pink slip anyway, but: theft notified to the police, amount lost, date and time. He could not disprove her story any more than he could prove it and what the hell, people just can’t live on the amount social security pays out anyway, people on social security need to moonlight or pull shots like reporting non-existent crimes to boost their income survival level. Need breeds remarkable ingenuity.

  A boy had been reported missing by his distraught mother, just ten years old. Details had been taken, description faxed to every police station in Strathclyde. The family home had been searched, every nook and cranny from the basement to rafter in front of a disbelieving and distressed mother and her comforting neighbour.

  ‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed or offended about, madam,’ Sussock had said calmly, gently: there was no need to add to her distress. ‘It’s routine. In a case like this we have to cover every possibility, check the obvious first. We are not accusing you or pointing the finger of blame. He might be hiding: that’s happened before.’

  ‘Or in case his body’s been hidden,’ the woman sobbed. ‘That’s what you’re saying. In case he’s been done away with. Why don’t you dig the garden while you’re at it?’

  The Alsatian in the modest rear garden was in fact a sniffer dog and was at that time sitting contentedly on the lawn awaiting the next command from his handler. The woman had assumed the Alsatian to be a police dog and nothing more: Sussock felt disinclined to disabuse her of that notion. ‘It’s just routine,’ he had said again, and the woman turned and buried her head in her neighbour’s shoulder.

  It was just routine at this stage, but Sussock had put his years in, he was an experienced cop, he had expertise if he wasn’t an expert. He had developed a ‘nose’ for a ‘nasty one’ and he didn’t like the smell of this one, not at all. A middle-class area of Glasgow, a tree-lined avenue, ‘sought-after family home in a stonebuilt terrace’ as the estate agents would say, inhabited by professional people, responsible people, as in this home: mother a teacher, father a university teacher presently on a lecture tour of the States. This was the sort of neighbourhood where children are well brought up, go where they are allowed to go and nowhere else, come home on time and not a minute later, and who always say ‘no’ to strangers—say ‘no’ and run away, especially if he’s in a car. No, he didn’t like this one at all. Not at all.