Long Day Monday

by Peter Turnbull

  Sussock ignored her, he ignored his sneering son. Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of leaving home, he would have been annoyed, provoked into violence perhaps, but no longer. Rummaging through his belongings for the summer coat and jacket he needed, he thought them both sad and very pathetic. And time would solve many things. His divorce would come through any day now and he could force an action for Division and Sale. Sell the bungalow, split the proceeds, that would give him enough for a room and kitchen of his own, from which no one could order him to go and where he could settle for a long and comfortable retirement.

  Later, in the pub in Shawlands after a few beers and whiskies, he found himself brooding on the past. He still didn’t know where things had gone wrong, he couldn’t identify the point at which the rot had set in, and rot it was. His marriage had suffered a cancer which had grown insidiously and when the state of his marriage was recognized it was too late, the symptoms had been ignored for too long and when he did open up the body of his marriage, he had found it irredeemably riddled: shot to hell. Nothing to do but get out. A few months of difficult living conditions was, be believed, a small investment in order to earn a tranquil ‘third phase’ of life.

  Last orders were called and Sussock edged to the end of the bar to make way for the inevitable stampede. He did not want more alcohol, he had drunk his fill, but even less he wanted to walk into the street. He caught the barman’s attention and waved a five-pound note.

  In the event he was the last to leave the bar. He was not pressed to leave. It seemed to him that the bar staff in their white shirts and black trousers could tell a man who could handle his liquor and who was lost in his own thoughts. They allowed him a wide berth and they swept the carpet and put upholstered stainless steel stools on the tables. They knew that he would leave eventually. Sussock drained his glass and turned and nodded to a young man wiping ashtrays, who nodded back and smiled. ‘Good night, sir. Thank you.’

  He walked to her flat. The flat with ‘Willems’ on the door. As he climbed her stair he recalled his own childhood vividly; he had grown up in a flat similar to hers. Except that he was one of six children in a room and kitchen and not in Shawlands but in the Gorbals, the old Gorbals of global infamy, and he remembered the screams in the night. The blood on the stair in the morning, and the toilet shared with three other families.

  He knocked on her door. She didn’t answer. He knocked again. He bent down and peered through the letter-box. No lights. She wasn’t at home. He sank to the stone floor of the landing and leaned his head against the door.

  CHAPTER 6

  Saturday, 10.00-1430 hours

  Daniel Galley stroked the plaster cast of the skull and pondered Donoghue’s question. He raised his eyebrows, pursed his lips and said, ‘All day, I should think.’

  ‘Quicker than I had anticipated.’ Donoghue glanced out of the window at the university buildings, the neatly tended lawns, the trees evidently older than the buildings and obviously sensitively preserved and built around.

  ‘Well, it’s only the third that I’ve done.’ Galley held the skull, Hamlet-like. ‘It’s still a new technique and the end result is a little like a Photofit in that I can only produce a likely approximation of what I believe that she looked like in life. The lips and nose, for example, have a shape or a characteristic which has no bone structure, not “betrayed” as we say, by the skull. So I have to guess and go by as much as you and the pathologist can tell me.’ Galley placed the plaster cast delicately on the bench and picked up the report and read from it selectively. ‘So…we know that it’s a female skull, the forensic odontologist has given the age of the teeth as twenty years, plus or minus two years…all right…and you are assuming a white European, or Caucasian, female?’

  ‘Yes.’ Donoghue stood sideways on to Galley whom he found to be a small man, balding, slight of frame, round spectacles and who moved stiffly in a starched white coat. Galley was a medical artist by profession. His studio at the university was decorated with delicate paintings in pastel shades of layers of muscle, of bone structures, of major organs. ‘Yes,’ he said again, ‘we are indeed assuming a white European female on the basis that all missing person reports for the time of her disappearance are for Caucasians.’

  ‘How long ago did she disappear, Mr Donoghue?’

  ‘Perhaps twenty-five years ago, sir. She was buried in a shallow grave in a Lanarkshire field. Her parents will have assumed her dead many years ago. If you could put a face on the skull, somebody might recognize it, or we could check it against photographs of the missing persons, and if a name is suggested we could check the dental records and perhaps confirm an identity. If we could do that it would amount to a huge stride forward in our investigation.’

  ‘Well, yes, as I say, Mr Donoghue, one day is all I need because the technique itself is really very straightforward. It’s a theory that has been possible for centuries because it depends only on the pattern of muscle tissue on the skeleton and the existence of that knowledge can be traced back to Hippocrates. What held it up was the time we had to wait for alginate to be developed, that’s the moulding compound used to make the plaster cast of the skull. Conventional plaster casts are not sufficiently strong to stand the innumerable little holes that have to be drilled into them to hold the cocktail sticks. Also, they are not strong enough to stand up to the pressure of clay being moulded, kneaded, on.’

  ‘Cocktail sticks?’ Donoghue smiled.

  ‘Cocktail sticks. We drill holes and key locations, about fifty in all, so that they protrude as measuring sticks. Then we’ simply build up the modelling clay to represent the thickness of muscle and skin at those places as they would be in life, allowing for the differences inherent in age, sex and race. So that if memory serves, a Caucasoid female of twenty years will have a muscle thickness of three point five millimetres over her forehead, and four point seven-five millimetres above the eyebrows.’ He reached for the folder. ‘I’ve got a chart here. Yes, four point seven-five millimetres for the eyebrows of a twenty-year-old Caucasoid female. It’s five point five millimetres over the eyes, eight point five millimetres over the upper lip, ten millimetres over the lower lip, ten point five millimetres over the jaw, five point seven-five millimetres beneath the chin, and so on; precise measurements for all points of the skull, using the skull as the matrix, the framework to hang the flesh on. Skulls appear identical, but they are very slightly different from each other and those differences are accentuated by the flesh and muscle which cover them. I find it ironic: whether this girl was considered pretty or otherwise in life would come down to her bone structure varying from the norm by a millimetre or two, but that would be quite sufficient to make a whole world of difference to her quality of fife. So unfair.’

  ‘Indeed. And a simple process.’

  ‘Very simple in essence.’ Galley closed the folder and replaced it on the shelf ‘What is difficult is the necessity of being painstakingly slow, and accepting the need for single-minded concentration. This is a job for the jeweller or watchmaker with his eyeglass, it isn’t a job for the baker who likes to laugh and joke with his mates while pummelling his dough.’

  ‘Certainly seems not.’ Donoghue was not unimpressed. It was, he had long realized, the nature of police work, particularly of criminal detection, that the team is multifaceted; there’s a place for the brawn, for the kicking in of doors, and there’s a place for the mild-mannered Mr Galley quietly working away, utterly engrossed in a small room in an obscure building of the university. ‘Well, all I can do is leave you to it, sir.’

  ‘Appreciate it, Mr Donoghue. I don’t like people looking over my shoulder. If you give me a call on the phone about five, bell me at five, as they say in newspeak, I’ll be able to tell you when I’ve finished it, indeed if I haven’t already done so by then.’

  Donoghue smiled. ‘Thank you for giving up your Saturday, sir.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’d quite forgotten that it was Saturday. You know, when I get in this room all n
otion of date and time vanish. Oh, but I respond to the phone.’

  ‘Five o’clock.’

  ‘Should see me almost there. Allowing an hour for lunch.’

  Montgomerie pondered the shiny eyes, eyes of transparent scheming. He pondered the silver whiskers, a huge red mouth inside which were a few yellow pegs going up or down. He winced at the occasional blast of searing breath. Montgomerie shifted his position on his chair and glanced sideways, two youths sat on the scarlet horsehair bench at the far side of the bar, the track marks in their arms were visible to Montgomerie, even at that distance. One of the youths lolled his head about as if in a state of semiconsciousness, the other was completely catatonic. At intervals around the bench were places where the upholstery had been slashed and the horsehair pulled out in clumps. High on the wall, mounted on a metal shelf, was a television which had both the colour and the volume turned up too loud, beaming in racing from Cheltenham; images from another world. Montgomerie attempted to push his chair further back from the heat of the breath of the man with the whiskers and yellow teeth, but the chain which held the chair to the floor allowed him little leeway. Montgomerie was in the Gay Gordon, was sitting opposite Tuesday Noon, and he said, ‘Come on, Tuesday, don’t crap me around. I haven’t had breakfast.’

  Montgomerie had enjoyed a quiet night shift. A murder, routine, normal and grubby and cheap. One ned impales another on a five-inch thin-bladed kitchen knife, that being Scotland’s number one murder weapon, and was still standing shaking and sobbing over the body of his ‘mate’ when the police arrived and gently took the murder weapon from his hands. There was a mugging, again, two burglaries, but it was Friday cum Saturday night in Glasgow, it was a uniformed cops night when alcohol and gangs of rival youths mix and when the cells fill slowly and steadily until they are full at around midnight. By 04.30 things had quietened and Montgomerie had turned his attention to the Herald crossword and managed all but two clues. Finally, awash with coffee, he pushed his chair back and put his feet on his desk. He did not attempt to sleep, but, subtly different, he gave up the attempt to stay awake and he entered a strange half-sleep, with eyes closed, brain dulled, but still heard noises inside the building, the banging of doors, the ringing of a distant phone, and occasionally noises from outside, the high-pitched hum of an early bus, the klaxons of fire engines, most probably, he thought, on an exercise. At 08.00 he became aware of an increase in the activity both inside and outside the building and as if helped by a built-in alarm clock he stirred, shook sleep from his eyes, washed in the toilets, straightened his tie and read over the cases he was to hand over to the CID day shift.

  ‘Go and talk to your snout.’ Donoghue reclined in his chair. It was 08.45, it had taken him fifteen minutes to wade through the cases that Montgomerie had handed to him and a split second to decide that there was nothing, nothing at all that warranted one minute of CID time to be diverted from the two main inquiries; the two inquiries that had caused him to come in to work on a Saturday. ‘Go and talk to him, Montgomerie, he’s been a good source of information in the past. I know the two incidents are unlikely to have been committed by members of the criminal fraternity, but we can leave no stone unturned. Your snout is a stone and I’d like him turned over.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Montgomerie’s eyes felt tired.

  Donoghue saw the look of weariness in the young officer’s eyes, saw it and ignored it. ‘So go and find him. We have a missing child, we have a lunatic who’s been murdering women for twenty-five years. Like I said, Tuesday Noon is not likely to have any information but we can’t afford not to turn him over. Hand these files to Abernethy, tell him to file them under pending.’

  Abernethy sat at his desk in the CID room, young, fresh-faced, keen as mustard but with a veteran’s look in his eyes. He saw Montgomerie advance on him with a pile of files. ‘Work?’ he said.

  ‘Not yet.’ Montgomerie stood in front of Abernethy’s desk. ‘This stuff was generated last night. Fabian says I have to hand it to you with the request that you file them under pending.’ Abernethy took them and tossed them into a red wire basket on his desk. ‘Somebody rattle your cage?’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’ Montgomerie crossed the room with long, effortless strides. ‘I mean, I’ve just done a full shift and I want to go home. I want to sleep, it’s alien to the human condition that you have to prevent yourself from sleeping at night; now you can’t sleep during the day either.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ Said with controlled anger. ‘No. In fact, no. I have to go to a bar up the Round Toll and talk to a smelly old guy who won’t know a damn thing because the slave-driver wants to turn over stones, as he puts it.’

  ‘Well, you cultivated him, your grass, I mean.’ Abernethy leafed over a page in the file that he was reading. ‘All you can do is go and do it. Then once you’ve done it, you can go home and collapse into your pit.’

  ‘Aye.’ Montgomerie sat on his desk. ‘And maybe he won’t be there anyway. I’m not hanging around if he’s not there, that’s for sure. There is a limit to how much I can and will be put upon, murder inquiry or not.’

  ‘And a missing child,’ said Abernethy from behind the file.

  ‘I’d be obliged if you didn’t play games with my conscience.’ Montgomerie swivelled round and picked up the phone, dialled a nine for an outside line and then a local number. ‘Hi…it’s me…sorry…do you want me to phone back…thought that we could do something tonight…no. I’m at work…I’ve got to work on a bit, have to go and see someone, can’t say I’m looking forward to it. All right. Sorry I disturbed you. I’ll phone you later.’ He put the phone down, but only after she had slammed hers down.

  ‘You tend to forget people like to sleep in on Saturday mornings,’ he said to Abernethy’s file. ‘I mean, when you work shifts long enough you forget that the rest of the world doesn’t.’ He looked at the telephone. ‘I’ve just stirred up a hornet’s nest.’

  ‘Hope your snout makes it worth your while,’ Abernethy grunted. ‘Better go and dig him up. He’ll be wanting his breakfast.’

  ‘Aye.’ Montgomerie stood. ‘Take an hour to get there. It’ll wake me up.’ He slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked out of the room, along the CID corridor, down the stairs, signed out and walked out and into the Saturday morning bustle, sun shining off the red sandstone tenements and the grey of the concrete where the M8 cut a trench through the heart of the city. He walked up to the Round Toll, to a pub on a corner, which was once on the corner of rambling tenements, and which now stood alone, surrounded by coarse grass. Beyond the grass was a squat prefabricated Health Centre and beyond that, striding across the skyline, a massive housing scheme glistening in the sun. Beyond that, and behind, three yellow high rises, with a blue, blue sky and wisp of white cloud as the backdrop to it all.

  Montgomerie pushed open the door of the Gay Gordon. It was 11.10. The bar had been open for a full ten minutes and would remain open for the next twelve hours, maybe longer if the landlord felt like chancing his arm by taking the risk that the police would be too busy to enforce the licensing laws. The publican glared at Montgomerie as he entered, he recognized a cop when he saw one, and by his glare he let Montgomerie know that he didn’t like cops, not in his sawdust. Montgomerie ignored the glare; in fact, he found himself reassured by it. If ever, he thought, if ever the landlord of the Gay Gordon came to like him, then he would be worried about himself. Very worried indeed. He clocked Tuesday Noon in the corner, hunched over a whisky. Beyond him were two smackheads, above the spaced out smackheads was the television which showed pictures of horses bounding across a green sward. The sun streamed into the Gay Gordon through huge stained glass windows and served to create a soporific atmosphere, a hot-house effect, encouraging punters to stay in and drink, to stay in and avoid the reality of the world outside, the hard pavement, the fresher air, the stagger home.

  Montgomerie strode up to the gantry and said, ‘Whisky and an orange juice.’

&
nbsp; ‘Orange juice.’ Echoed with contempt. The barman glared at Montgomerie. Montgomerie held the glare. The barman moved in sudden jerky movements and slammed the glasses down hard on the richly polished hardwood gantry. Montgomerie dropped a five-pound note beside the drinks. The barman snatched it up, rang up the till and replaced it with smash. Montgomerie scooped up the coins, made a point of checking the change and then nodded icily to the barman. He walked across the sawdust through the sunbeams and sat opposite Tuesday Noon.

  ‘We have a wee problem, Tuesday.’

  Tuesday Noon’s stubby fingers curled round the whisky and lifted it to his lips. He drained his glass in one go. Neat. He put it back on the table and breathed searing breath into Montgomerie’s face.

  ‘So we need all the help we can get, we’re talking missing children, we’re talking murdered women, maybe a week after they were abducted.’

  Tuesday Noon looked blankly at Montgomerie and pushed the empty glass across the sticky surface of the table.

  ‘Come on, Tuesday, don’t crap me around. I haven’t had any breakfast.’

  ‘I don’t hear nothing, Mr Montgomerie.’

  ‘Didn’t think that you would, Tuesday. It’s most probable that neither the murder nor the abduction—if the little boy was abducted—was committed by a member of the crim-frat. But my boss says I’ve got to heave over stones. So I’m heaving over stones.’

  ‘So I’m a stone now?’

  ‘Among other things, Tuesday, among other things.’

  ‘I’ll keep my ears open, Mr Montgomerie.’

  ‘Do so, Tuesday.’ Montgomerie pushed the orange towards Tuesday Noon. ‘Here, drink it. You can’t have had any vitamin C since you last came of out Barlinnie: you know, that’s the place where you get your vitamins by way of injection in your backside.’

  ‘I ken.’