‘I remain unconvinced, Mr Farmer.’
‘The other advantage is that Carluke is an unmanned station.’
King caught his breath. This time Farmer had something.
‘It’s at the edge of the town, down a leafy cul-de-sac. The point is that if he took the bus he would have had to hang around at the bus station and he’d be clocked as a stranger, he’d have to speak to the driver to get his fare. But with the train he could have remained out of sight in some shrubs, waited until he hears the rails start to sing, then hop across the footbridge and on to the train. He’d pay on the train and the first question the guards asks is, “Which station did you get on at, Jim?” He could well be inside Glasgow before he was asked for his fare. Equally, he might be seen getting on at Carluke, but that would be bad luck. It’s a chance I’d take if I were him.’
‘You have a point there, sir.’ King nodded. ‘You’d have made a good cop.’
‘I was. Held a rank senior to you.’ Farmer grinned. ‘I was with the Lothian and Borders, worked in Leith. Like Dodge City on a Saturday night. Inherited a ton of folding green from a relative I didn’t know I had, took early retirement, very early, and sank the cash into my farm. Never looked back. Good evening.’
‘More like a man than a woman,’ said the girl with a small face, a hardened face, cold, used, abused, eyes, cheap clothes and track marks in her forearms. ‘I’d like to get back to the street; you know this has been a quiet night so far, a slow night. I’m getting strung out. I have to make another thirty quid before I can get my fix and I don’t like having to work after midnight.’
‘Two hours yet,’ said Abernethy.
‘Less. Last time I was really strung out I bit through the flesh in my thumb. I still have a scar. Look.’
‘Not now. So this woman…?’
‘Can I smoke?’
Abernethy pushed a round piece of tin foil which had once contained a meat pie across the table. The girl took a ten-pack of cheap nails from a plastic handbag, lit it with a disposable lighter. She drew the smoke in deeply.
‘Just how old are you?’ asked Abernethy.
‘They all ask that question,’ the girl said, smiling, ‘and I tell you, they divide into two groups: half are relieved that I’m over sixteen, half are disappointed. But I’m old enough, I’ve got two children taken from me by the children’s panel on advice of the social workers. Social workers have more troubles than their clients. Couple of my regulars are social workers, one of them works in the night duty team, I see him in the afternoons, the other’s at a hospital, I think. But looking young is something I use. I make good money from men who like little girls.’ She looked at Abernethy and jabbed the air with her smouldering nail. ‘Now that is a social service.’
‘Dare say it is. Maybe you could tell us about your clients sometime, the ones that like little girls.’
‘Sometime. Maybe I’ll meet you halfway, I don’t want to put myself out of work, but I’ll tell you what: if one of them really acts out of order, like asks me if I can get a real little girl for him, I’ll feed you his name or car registration. Deal?’
‘Deal.’
‘What’s your name, anyway?’
‘Abernethy.’
‘Abernethy. I like you, Abernethy. I think it’s rich you ask me about my age. I’d say that you’re too young to be a cop. You’ve still got a couple of spots on your face. Anyway, you’re more civil than most cops. So I like you. When I was a wee girl our family doctor was Dr Abernethy. He was a nice man and that name makes me feel all warm inside.’
‘That right?’
‘Aye.’
‘Tell me about this woman. That’s the reason you’re in here talking to me. When you’ve told me all, then you can go back to the street.’
‘Aye, well…Sandra. Sandra’s a good kid.’
‘Was.’
‘Was. That’s going to take some getting used to.’
‘Maybe you could learn from it.’
The girl shot a glare at Abernethy. He held it.
‘Well, you get into cars with strange men as well, don’t you?’
She looked at the Police Mutual calendar, blue on orange wall-covering. She looked at the grey plaster ceiling. ‘But she had a problem. With me it’s junk. With Sandra it was the drink.’
‘We know.’
‘She was better off than me and the other smackheads. See, with her she could work one night and earn enough for a three-day bender, and pay her rent and buy her food. With me eight hours on the street pays for one fix of junk with enough left over to puncture myself with in the mornings. Then I need money for food and rent. And she can leave off drink easier than I can let go of smack.’
‘That’s open to dispute.’
‘Aye, it’s like a dose of flu, coming off heroin. I’ve heard that. It’s always said by folk who aren’t on it. I’ve seen people in cold turkey, it doesn’t look like any flu bug to me. Then they say it’s in your head, and that’s rich too because the one part of you that is OK is your head, your stomach’s getting turned inside out and your legs are being power drilled, but your head’s OK.’
‘The woman?’
‘Aye. So this man, only it’s not a man, rolls up in his little car. A black Ford. He looked daft in it. Him so big and the car so tiny. Anyway I went up to check him out, you know how it’s done, you’ve got to get it right on the first impression. He winds the window down and I see it’s a woman. She said she wanted a girl for her husband who was old and ill and on the way out, wanted a girl to lie alongside him—original, but not what you’d call an attractive proposition. Any girl would really jack up the price for that. A dying man…’ She shook her head. ‘But I wasn’t strung out enough to consider an old man.’ She drew on the nail. ‘She was right to target a smackhead for an offbeat request…a strung-out smackhead gets so desperate that they’ll do anything, I mean anything.’ The girl dogged the nail in the cheap tin ashtray. ‘Anyway she pestered, really pushy, and she had this manner about her—I’ve come across it before, years ago, a weird guy, he sort of pulled you towards him. I remember feeling like a fish on a line being reeled in. I wanted to resist but I couldn’t. She had the same soft voice, gentle manner, but a look in her eyes which fixed you, so you couldn’t walk away, and like this guy years ago, the woman in a black car just wouldn’t take no for an answer, she made me want to get in the car.’
‘But you didn’t?’
‘No. See, this guy I mentioned, years ago, I gave in to him, gave in to his—his magnetism and got in his car. He drove me out to the Campsies and beat me up, gave me a real doing and ripped off all my clothes and stole my money. I made it back to the road as naked as the day I was born, a car stopped for me, I was OK then. I was off the street for a year after that and then—’ she shrugged ‘—the needle.’
‘I see.’
‘But after that I have always been wary of the soft voice, the persuader, and that look in the eyes and when I run into a personality like that I turn and run. It’s the only way to break free, you have to tear the hook out of you. That’s what it feels like, as soon as they start looking at you and start to talk to you, there’s a hook working it’s way in.’
‘So you turned and ran?’
‘Yes. I heard the car drive off. I saw it later. I saw Sandra getting in.’
‘What night was that?’
‘Maybe a week ago.’
‘Can’t you…’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I wish I could. The days just blend and merge, you know, I can’t tell you what day of the week it was.’
‘You sure it was the same car?’
‘No. No, I’m not sure. I was too far away.’
‘But it was identical?’
‘Same colour, same type, same evening thirty minutes later, same street…too much of a coincidence.’
Abernethy nodded. ‘I think you’re right. Let’s go for a description.’
‘Like I said. I thought she was a man.’
/> ‘Big?’
‘Big. Big-boned, masculine, heavy features, strong face, short curly hair, even had some whiskers, a few white hairs growing from her chin. She had a man’s sports jacket, only when I got close did I see a woman’s chest, a tweed skirt and heavy stockings. She wasn’t pretending to be a man. Had sort of womanly spectacles, not fancy, twee, ultra-feminine spectacles, heavy framed, but a woman’s frame none the less.’
Abernethy wrote on his pad. ‘You don’t talk like most of the girls who walk the street, Zoe Padbury.’
‘Oh?’
‘You’ve got a softer voice, use words like you have had an education.’
‘I did have.’ Zoe Padbury shrugged. ‘My father is something enormous in British Steel, Scottish Division. I went to a private school, my two brothers are doctors. My father has disowned my, but my mother still prays for me. Don’t tell me the only thing that stands between me and recovering all that is a dose of flu. I don’t want to hear it, not now.’
‘OK. So this woman, looked like a man. What did she want?’
‘I need to work, Abernethy.’
‘Answer the questions. Then you can go.’
‘She wanted a girl. She said she wanted her old man to have a girl.’
‘Old man.’
‘Her husband. She said he was sick, I thought she meant that he was on the way out, and she wanted to have a young thing to ease him in his final hours.’ Zoe Padbury shuddered.
‘I’m surprised someone agreed to that.’
‘Who says anybody did?’ Zoe Padbury replied, revealing to Abernethy quick wits behind the racked muscles and the piercing, aching joints of the addict shortly to be in need of a fix. ‘That’s what she said to me. She probably recognized me as a smackhead and knew a smackhead would do things other girls wouldn’t. Maybe she asked Sandra something else. A woman once hired me for her son, you know, his first time, maybe it was something like that, or maybe she smelled her breath and invited her to a drinking party.’
‘What was her voice like?’
‘Husky. Slow. Deliberate. I think.’
‘Think harder.’
‘It’s hard to remember. I turned her down almost immediately, the manner she had and her proposition made her strictly a no-go area. Anyway, I’d just shot up, I could pick and choose for an hour or so. That’s the way it is. If she’d have stopped me six hours later and the work had been slow I would have agreed. You don’t know what it’s like, Abernethy. Listen, if I needed a score badly enough I’d climb into bed with a scabby horse. Can I go now?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘Come on.’
‘Oh.’ Zoe Padbury put both arms across her stomach and shivered.
‘We’d like you to help us make up a Photofit.’
‘Couldn’t miss her.’ The guard stood on the open door of the carriage. ‘Aye, I remember her well, held one hand over her eyes, the right, I think. I was on morning shift last week, last shift of the run before I came on to back shifts this week. That was the first train of the shift, that would put us into Carluke at about six-thirty. She came running over the footbridge and jumped aboard. Where did you know where to find me?’ He glanced along the length of the low-level platform at Glasgow Central.
‘Phoned the depot. Told them I wanted to speak to the guard on the first train out of Carluke on Thursday. They told me to wait for this train.’
‘I see. Aye, a big old woman, but strong, she’d been digging, had that smell of the garden about her, you know the scent of freshly turned soil. Not to mention the dirt on her shoes.’
‘The garden,’ said King as the train doors whirred shut.
The explosion of light hurt his eyes long after the flash, long after the camera had been lowered, long after she had shut and locked the door again. The door had been thrown open, she stood there filling the door frame, like his father filled the door frame and she stood there, with a patch still over one eye like she had when she stopped her car that day and a camera in the other. He croaked that he was thirsty. She had raised the camera and popped the flash. Tomorrow, she had promised. Tomorrow, or the day after, all the water you can drink.
A whole tub full. Just for you, she had said. Then we’ll go somewhere. Somewhere in the country.
CHAPTER 8
Monday, 09.00-Midday
Abernethy held the phone to his ear. It was the tenth call of the morning and already his ears burned as if from a childhood cuffing.
‘DC Abernethy…no, Abernethy…yes, ask for me or the duty officer CID officer…duty CID officer…we’re phoning all opticians in Glasgow…if an adult female patient contacts the optician, or has contacted the optician in the last few days, and who suffers from a condition apparently called diplopia…d-i-p-l-o-p-i-a…double vision, and who may have lost or damaged her spectacles recently and wants a replacement pair…can you inform us immediately? Yes, it’s vital. Urgent…well, yes, any patient with Diplopia if you like…thank you.’ He replaced the phone and picked it up again. There were twelve columns of ophthalmic opticians in the Glasgow yellow pages.
‘It’s her all right.’ Reynolds studied the dental charts and then looked at the teeth of the skeleton, by then fully rinsed with industrial alcohol. ‘No doubt about it. You see the front incisors, how twisted they are. And the bridgework here? Sorry I wasn’t at home yesterday, by the way.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Sussock. But he didn’t. To him it was just a rinsed down skeleton with gaping orbits and protruding teeth. When it was fleshed he had stood a few feet away from it enjoying a job he had thought ‘a skive’.
‘Well, the identification is positive. I have no objection to you having a forensic odontologist to come over and give a second opinion, but I am satisfied it’s the skeleton of—’ he looked at the top of the dental chart ‘—Mary Manning.’ He replaced the cloth over the face of the skeleton and slid Mary Manning back into the bank of metal drawers.
Sussock left the GRI and walked out into the mid morning sun, already high, a blue sky and a welcome cooling breeze. He breathed deeply; soon, all too soon, he knew he would not be able to, soon, before he knew it, the thin air of autumn would attack his lungs. He had been a heavy smoker in his youth, smoking on duty when he could, as when, twenty-five years earlier, he had enjoyed a cigarette while standing guard over a stolen car, when all the while he was standing guard over the freshly buried corpse of Mary Manning whose skeletal remains he had just identified. It had been that summer, he recalled, that he had stopped smoking. The habit was doing his lungs and his pocket no good at all: in fact, it was doing both great harm. Then years later the chest pains started, they started in autumn and stayed until spring. ‘You’re a smoker,’ said the GP. ‘I was,’ said Sussock, ‘but I stopped, years ago.’
‘Doesn’t matter. You did it and it’s caught you up.’ Sussock had come to loathe and dread the winter: the advertisement for the sports car, ‘Goes like a Scottish summer, grips like a Scottish winter,’ held special significance for him. But hope was perhaps on his distant horizon, perhaps a divorce, perhaps retirement: soon he could spend deep midwinters snug and warm in a room and kitchen, or on a pensioner’s holiday in Spain.
He reached his car, opened the door and let the windows down to allow the car to ‘breathe’. Then he drove to Rawyards.
Rawyards, on the north-eastern fringe of Airdrie. Narrow streets, low-rise council housing scheme, on a hillside, few amenities. Not a pleasant place to live during the summer. In winter it was the end of the earth.
He went to Northburn Street, to No. 267, the last known address of Mary Manning. It was a flat in a block house, a building of four flats, two up and two down. The front garden was overgrown, a bin liner of domestic refuse had burst and its contents lay strewn on the grass, most probably by the dogs, thought Sussock. The pathway was pitted and broken. He went to the second door at the side of the house. It was scarred as by slashes with a knife, the glass pane had been sheeted over with plywood. Sussock kne
w what sort of household was behind the door. He could even smell the sickly sweet aroma of alcohol before the door was opened. He rapped on the door and heard the sound echo in the hallway, no floor or wall covering to deaden it, the sound of his knock bounced clearly off floorboards and plaster walls.
‘Who is it?’ A woman’s yell.
‘Police.’ Sussock spoke through the letter-box.
Sussock heard a heavy footfall come down the stairs. The door was opened. Sussock reeled from the alcohol fumes.
‘Yes?’ The woman stood at the bottom of the stairs, which, as Sussock had surmised, were uncarpeted. She was well built, dirty, matted hair, a round, reddened face ingrained with dirt. She wore a red T-shirt which revealed thick, flabby arms; a too small pair of jeans gave way to dirty bare feet. Sussock thought her to be about sixty but knew she could well be in her early forties. It’s what Rawyards and alcohol can do to a woman.
‘Police,’ said Sussock. He flashed his ID.
The woman looked at him with narrowing eyes.
‘I’m looking for a Mrs Manning.’
‘You’ve found her.’
‘You have a daughter, Mary?’ Sussock glanced over the woman’s shoulder, bin liners and empty bottles sat on the stairway leading from the flat to the doorway. A man moved across the landing. He was stripped to the waist, he moved slowly, sluggishly, over-concentrating. He didn’t notice the open door below him, or Sussock talking to Mrs Manning.
‘My stepdaughter,’ said the woman. ‘Though she was just five years younger than me. See, me, I married her dad when she was eighteen and I was twenty-three.’ She spoke with a searing hot breath, then added by means of explanation, ‘We are on a wee bender.’
‘Been going long?’
‘Two days. We’ve got enough to see us through today, make it a good three-day bender.’
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