In Place of Death

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In Place of Death Page 8

by Craig Robertson


  ‘Urban explorers. They like to go places they shouldn’t.

  Abandoned buildings. Old places. Tall places. They go in, without breaking in, and photograph what’s there. Old schools, churches, factories, tunnels. That sort of thing. There’s websites if you want to know more.’

  ‘Maybe . . .’ She sounded doubtful. ‘And how – apart from knowing everything – do you know about urbexers?’

  He shrugged casually. ‘I know someone who used to do it.’

  ‘Okay. You really think someone would see it as a good place to hide a body?’

  ‘Not now they wouldn’t. Now it looks a pretty stupid place to use. But before . . . you’d think it might never be found.’

  ‘So my suspect list is locals, kids, historians, council workers, engineers, urbexers, serial killers and teenagers. Have I forgotten anyone?’

  ‘That probably covers it. Can’t think what else to tell you.’

  ‘It helps, Danny. Thank you.’

  ‘Any time. Come back if there’s more I can help with. What about you, kid? How are things with you and my nephew?’

  ‘Good. Very good, actually. He’s behaving himself, not bugging me, generally doing what I tell him. The training is paying off at last. I think I might keep him.’

  Danny raised his coffee mug. ‘I’ll drink to that. So where do you think you two will go from here? You just going to keep playing at secret boyfriend and girlfriend for ever?’

  She gave him a warning stare for a moment or two but it melted. There probably wasn’t anyone else she could talk to about this.

  ‘Maybe not. Probably not. It’s maybe time to become adults, Dan.’ She said it with a smile.

  ‘Adults, eh?’ he mocked gently. ‘You sure you’re ready for this?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘But I can feel us changing. For the better. That time we had apart made me think a lot about what I wanted. Now, I’m pretty sure I know. I love him. I still have my dad to think about, of course, but there’s probably room in my life for two men.’

  ‘Three surely?’

  ‘Ha. Of course, three. No show without punch, Uncle Dan. I need to sit down and talk to him about where we go from here. It’s difficult though, I need to make sure I—’

  ‘Find the right time?’

  ‘Yes. Exactly. This is serious stuff, Dan. This could go either way. It really could.’

  Chapter 13

  Tuesday afternoon

  ‘Hold your horses. I just want a last look around before we total the place.’

  ‘What for? It’s a dump.’

  Jackie Doran sighed and not for the first time he wondered about the philistines he had to work with. Okay, so if he’d wanted to have profound conversations about the art deco movement or the meaning of life then he shouldn’t have got into the demolition business. It wasn’t exactly choking with philosophers. It still got on his tits though that guys like Murray Inglis just didn’t see what was around them. All they wanted to do was knock the place down and get to the pub.

  Jackie was older. A lot older. Maybe that’s why he appreciated it more. When you were sixty-four and seeing the end of your own working life looming up in the rear-view mirror then you had a feeling for buildings like this that were about to be smashed to bits. It was called empathy. Murray Inglis would probably think empathy was a rap star or whatever they were calling them now.

  It was more than that though. He used to be a regular at the Odeon long before Inglis was born. His mum and dad, God bless them, used to take him when he was a kid. He remembered seeing his first movie there when he was eight. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. He’d never forget being amazed at the size of the room. Nearly three thousand people in one huge auditorium. Tell that to the kids today and they wouldn’t believe it.

  He couldn’t swear that he was impressed by the art deco then as much as he was by the movie. But he did remember the ceiling looking like it was fashioned in waves as it moved down over the balcony towards the screen. And at the sides of the stage itself were massive gold-coloured designs like the sides of great church organs, all latticed and glitzy. There was a tea room and ritzy foyers and lounges. It was some place, the old Odeon.

  Of course he didn’t know or care back then that it had been built by Verity & Beverley, the company that built all the big luxurious cinemas in Britain. This was the only one they built in Scotland and it was a beauty.

  Standing here now, inside with the doors long shut, he felt like he was part of it. Looking down on Renfield Street, seeing the world going past but being unseen behind the old building’s grimy windows, was exciting in a way that young guys like Inglis wouldn’t understand. It was like watching an old movie but in reverse. Like looking out from the screen.

  The building on the other side of Renfield Street looked fabulous. It was true what they said about most people never looking up. They missed out on so much, especially in a city like Glasgow. The architecture was stunning. The place opposite had incredible stone balconies, statues and carved heads. Intricate scrolls, beautiful pillars, arches and stonework. All above a couple of modest pubs.

  The building diagonally opposite was pretty incredible too. How many people walked past it every day and never noticed the terracotta turrets at the top that looked like they’d been pinched from some German castle above the Rhine? Maybe there was a princess locked up in one of them, or a dwarf. Maybe he’d watched too many movies.

  ‘Jackie, are you going to shift? We’re on a schedule here and I’m going out the night.’

  Murray Inglis was going out every night. He didn’t know any other way to live his life. He would come in every morning with a hangover and go away every evening with an itch for another one. Jackie was too old for that nonsense. A few beers on a Friday night was his lot these days.

  ‘Son, I’m having a last look around. Deal with it. This building’s been standing here for seventy years. Another twenty minutes isn’t going to kill anybody.’

  Jackie wasn’t Inglis’s boss. Not technically. But he’d been round the block often enough to get away with just about anything he wanted. They couldn’t sack him for it and they certainly weren’t going to promote him if he was a good boy. There were benefits in being a year from retirement and being a bolshie bastard was one of them.

  Inglis disappeared, no doubt to tell the gaffer that the old bugger was being an old bugger again. That suited Jackie just fine. He could have a wander round in peace.

  What else did he see here? Lawrence of Arabia. Peter O’Toole appearing through the desert on that big screen. Bonnie and Clyde. Dr Zhivago. Which everyone had raved about but which lasted over three hours and bored him. The Dirty Dozen. And dozens more.

  It wasn’t just the movies either. The Beatles played there. The Rolling Stones too. He couldn’t get a ticket for the Stones and hadn’t wanted to see the Beatles. His cousin George had seen the Stones though and talked about it for weeks.

  The last thing he saw on the big single screen was On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The one with the Australian guy as James Bond where his wife gets killed at the end. That was 1969, just before they ruined the place. Every bit of the old interior, all the beautiful art deco stuff, disappeared. They made it into a three-screen complex and covered the front of the building in dull grey corrugated sheeting. Maybe no one knew it then but that was the beginning of the end.

  They added more and more screens and took away more and more of the magic. He wasn’t even sure of the last picture he’d seen there. It might have been Wall Street or maybe Rain Man, something like that in the late 1980s. Long time ago now. Seemed like another world.

  And now he was part of the team that was going to blast the Odeon into smithereens. He didn’t exactly feel good about that but he was just the hangman: someone else had been the judge and jury. Just following orders, the oldest excuse in the book.

  The front façade would be kept, safe from the other ravages, and would form the centrepiece of a new ten-floor office development. Nobody
seemed to give a flying fuck for the rest of it though.

  He walked through what was the main foyer, images of usherettes in tartan dresses and male staff in dark suits tumbling through his mind. The stairs rose from here to the old upper foyer where there had once been a bar, a walk he’d made a hundred times but never like this. This time, the likelihood was that no one would ever make it again.

  He walked further back into the building, his torch-light leading the way down memory lane. Jackie had been in a few times since it closed in 2006, including before it had been stripped out. Since then it had lain dormant and such a waste, bang in the middle of the city centre and nothing happening to it.

  It was so quiet back here. Only the occasional creak of the building and the distant scurry of rodents broke the silence. He liked that though. It gave it an atmosphere it deserved.

  The rooms were all bare but he’d been there when the floors were still covered in dark blue carpets, dotted dirty grey where the chairs had been and marked with the sticky stains of old popcorn and spilled juice. The stage was for ghosts now, the old screens long since taken away and sold off.

  There were no numbers on the rooms any more but he still knew which was which. The rooms got smaller as the numbers got bigger. Something great had been chopped up into little bits of something ordinary. Cinema 1 had still been a good size but by the time you got down to what had been Cinema 9 then it was pretty claustrophobic and banked steeply from back to front. It was the space that had been 9 that he went into now, breathing in fifty-plus years of his own thoughts.

  He stood and listened, closing his eyes and remembering. It was so small and dark that you could almost hear projectors whirring, reels clacking and people shushing each other. You could feel that buzz, the one you got when the whole crowd felt the same thing at the same time. Fear and amusement and sadness and relief. He could imagine dust whirling in the light of the projector and dancing through it were glimpses of car chases and Westerns and custard pies.

  He could still smell popcorn and hairspray, hot dogs and sickly orange juice. He could smell sweat and hope and teenage troubles. There was something else though, something newer and yet older. It was the stench of decay. Maybe the smell of the old place finally about to breathe its last.

  Jackie wandered down the steep bank to where the screen would have been, seeking one last bit of nostalgia before he left. He’d always wanted to be up there; not that he’d ever dared tell anyone for fear of them laughing at him. He’d imagined himself in a shoot-out with Clint Eastwood or a punch-up with The Duke. Maybe in a love scene with Sophia Loren. Jeez, his pals would have wet themselves if he’d told them that.

  He was up there now though. The silver screen. Even if it hadn’t been so much silver as dusty grey. The walls to the side a shabby, peeling blue. Jackie gave a little soft-shoe shuffle, like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire, and put his hands out like it was show business.

  He even gave a little bow to the ghosts and turned as if to walk off into the screen. That’s when he saw it. That’s when he realized that the smell of decay wasn’t just from the building.

  It was tucked into a little recess to the side of where the screen would have been, partly covered by a sheet of plywood. There was a foot sticking out though. An ashen-white foot that barely seemed real but he knew that it was.

  Jackie really didn’t want to look any further. He backed away then stopped himself, breathed hard and went forward again. He took hold of the plywood and lifted it, the stench flooding his nose as he did so. All at once he saw the rotten corpse of a woman, naked and eaten, her flesh chewed and decomposed.

  This time, he backed away with his mouth open for three steps until he tripped over the lip of the small, raised stage. He was on his knees when he threw up.

  Jackie got to his feet, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, not daring to look at the body again. He hadn’t seen anything like that on the big screen, not once. With his back to it, he ran as fast as his overweight body could take him, up the slope and out of what had been Cinema 9.

  Chapter 14

  Narey climbed out of her car onto Renfield Street and saw the old cinema looking like she’d never seen it before. Blue flashing lights threw shadows onto the grimy white walls and the tall windows, somehow looking apt on the 1930s design. It was the opening night for a horror movie.

  Half the street had been blocked off to accommodate the two squad cars, two unmarked vehicles and the ambulance that would only be needed to take a body away. Uniformed cops stood guard in front of the crime scene tape while others helped direct the traffic chaos that they’d caused. Between them flitted white-suited ghosts who were waiting to carry out forensic duties.

  There was some wire fencing round the exterior, more for show than a real attempt to keep anyone out. She noticed the sign on it as she passed. Development by Saturn Property. Premises Protected by Mullen Security. Neither protected nor secure, she thought.

  She nodded at the cops on the tape and pushed past them with DC Becca Maxwell at her heels, ignoring the shouts from the journalists who wanted answers as to what was going on. Another officer pulled back the recently reopened front door and let them through. When it closed behind them, Narey allowed a solitary shiver to pass through her as she thought how much the old place felt like an indoor cemetery, quiet and cold. It might only have held a single recent corpse but it still held the presence of a thousand more.

  A uniformed sergeant, a broad, dark-haired man in his mid-forties, looked up to see her and Maxwell approaching and dismissed one of his constables with a quiet word before stepping forward to meet them. He tipped his head in greeting, his eyes battle-weary. ‘DI Narey? I’m Jack McVean. What do you need to know?’

  ‘Well . . . who found the body for starters.’

  ‘Demolition man found it. Name of Jackie Doran. He’s over there.’

  Narey followed his nod to see a balding man in his sixties sitting on his own and looking dazed. He was cradling a mug of something hot and probably wishing it was something stronger.

  ‘He was back in the building having a last look around before they got ready to bring the place down. Says he used to come here when he was a kid. Didn’t we all? I think he nearly crapped himself when he found the woman. He was pretty shook up, still is, but he phoned it in. Constables Dixon and Corry responded and they’ve interviewed him. The building’s been shut since 2006, stripped out years ago and nothing but rats been in since. Mr Doran says it was last checked out a couple of months ago and been locked up in between. They were about ready to push the button and demolish it.’

  ‘Yeah, I saw it on the news. Shame. Okay, let’s see the body then and obviously I’ll want to talk to Mr Doran and the constables.’

  ‘This way.’

  McVean led her and Maxwell back into the building, through narrow corridors and plasterboard walls marked with painted numbers. She’d been here plenty of times but never quite like this. Her mum and dad had brought her at least once a month, packets of Munchies as a treat, the rare school-night visit if she was lucky. Then she’d been with various friends and boyfriends, fending off groping arms when it suited her. It was positively weird being in here now though.

  They got deeper into the shell until they came to a single door in the far recess. McVean opened it and stepped back to let them through. The room banked steeply away in front of her to where a small scrum huddled together near the far wall, the whole tableau illuminated by temporary lighting which threw long shadows onto the walls. Campbell Baxter was there and she recognized Paul Burke as being one of the SOCOs under his white suit and mask.

  As she got closer, she saw a single foot poking out between the forest of legs, the instep turned onto the dirty floor. The sea parted as Narey neared and she saw the corpse lying there on its back, one leg tucked under the other and the head broken.

  It was badly decomposed and had suffered from however long it had been hidden away in the old cinema. The building must have been
full of rats and mice and the body wasn’t a pretty sight. The woman had been left naked, stripped of dignity and her life as well as her clothes. Left there to end up under rubble when the place was flattened.

  Narey stood silently for a moment, contemplating the type of bastard who would do that to another human being.

  ‘Was she killed where she’s lying?’

  Paul Burke shook his head. ‘There’s tissue and blood spatter on the corner of the stage over there. Every indication that’s where it happened.’

  ‘When did the demolition guy find her?’

  ‘Less than an hour ago,’ McVean told her. ‘We had a car here within ten minutes.’

  ‘Anyone estimated how long ago she died?’

  Baxter made a face. The one he pulled when making out he’d been asked to make a definitive judgement when all she really wanted was some rough idea to work with.

  ‘I’m not in the business of guessing, DI Narey. If you—’

  Another voice cut in. ‘I’ll make a guess. Five to six weeks by the look of it.’ It was Winter, walking across the stage towards them with camera in hand and his kit bag over his shoulder.

  She glared at him, resenting both his sudden presence and his manner. She’d known, of course, that he’d be on his way but was still irked at him turning up like this, far too familiar in front of the others. There was a line when they were at work, her line, and he knew he was crossing it. Most of all though, she begrudged the fact that she was going to have to step aside and let him get at the body first.

  ‘Mr Winter,’ she addressed him coolly. ‘This is Sergeant McVean. You know everyone else. Do what you have to do and then let us get on with it.’

  He walked past her, his eyes fixed on the body and a strange, almost troubled look on his face. She’d seen him photograph victims many times and had been bothered by the enthusiasm, almost zeal, with which he approached his work. This time his lips were pursed tightly and his brows knotted anxiously. Maybe he had finally developed a sense of fitting solemnity but she doubted it.

 

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