All the Hidden Truths

by Claire Askew

‘Summers had walked in blood here, look,’ he said, skirting past the two body bags, pointing vaguely down at them. Birch looked, and saw what he meant: big, army-style boots with geometric treads, the prints dried and browning.

  ‘I followed the prints,’ Leake was saying, and Birch trailed them with her eyes, to where they seemed to disappear, fainter now, under the toilet door. ‘You’ll see that they go in, but they don’t come out again.’

  Birch smiled weakly at the SOCOs as she and Leake weaved between them. A few of them nodded in greeting, or mumbled a ‘marm,’ as they passed.

  ‘So here I was,’ Leake said, as they came to a stop outside the toilet door. ‘I’m stood here, thinking, unless he took his shoes off, he’s gone in there and he hasn’t come out. He’s still in that room. But I couldn’t – I couldn’t go in. I couldn’t make myself. I’m sorry . . .’

  Birch had placed a hand on Leake’s shoulder, and felt for herself as the background shiver became a heave, and then another: huge, quiet sobs had seemed to rise up in the man beside her and then fall out, one after the other.

  ‘David,’ she said. ‘It’s okay. You did right – as an unarmed officer, you did right. You waited for the cavalry.’

  Leake shook his head, flicking tears onto Birch’s sleeve.

  ‘But he was down,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear any shots fired in there, so he was down before I even got on this floor. He’d already killed himself. It was safe. And if I’d got in there, I don’t know . . . what if those girls were still alive then? What if I could have done something to help them?’

  Birch gave his shoulder a small squeeze.

  ‘You didn’t know,’ she said. ‘You didn’t know that Summers was dead. And as for those four girls . . . I’ve been given a sense of their injuries. Even if they were still alive, they were beyond any first aid you could have given. They were dead, or they were dying. You did right.’

  Leake had looked up at her then, looked into her eyes with so much fury – at her and at himself – that she’d dropped her hand from his shoulder, and taken a step backwards.

  ‘Well, I could have sat with them,’ he said. His voice caught in his throat and he twisted out a strange cough. ‘I could have been there with them, in their final minutes. But instead I stood out here, doing nothing. I stood here like a fucking coward.’

  In her pocket, Birch’s phone buzzed, kicking her back into the here and now. She’d sleepwalked as far as the toilet door, which was sealed off with signs and tape: there was further forensic work to be done in there. Birch shuddered. It was a small bathroom, with only two cubicles – yet Summers had cornered four girls in there. She hoped they’d been in there anyway, maybe fixing their hair before going to class, chatting, sharing lipstick. She hoped they hadn’t run in there to hide, and been punished for their mistake. A bathroom wasn’t a stupid thought: in the US, kids were told to run into toilet stalls and stand on the toilet bowl in the event of a shooting. Birch remembered this from a viral Facebook post a while back: a cute little three-year-old girl who’d been trained to do this at kindergarten in the wake of Sandy Hook. School shooters were always male, and social programming runs deep – even on a rampage like this, they’d be likely to hesitate before entering a ladies’ bathroom. But, Birch thought, he wanted to kill girls. Women, she corrected herself. All the dead were female, and only one of those in critical condition at the Royal Infirmary was male. Birch turned her back on the toilet door.

  ‘This is about girls,’ she said, quietly but aloud, into the long, empty throat of the corridor. ‘He had some issue with women. I’d bet all the money I have.’ She flipped her phone out of her pocket: a text from McLeod. She was being summoned.

  As she walked back down the length of the first floor – past the tape marks and the pale swatches of floor where the bloody boot-prints had been scrubbed at – she re-read the email with Moira Summers’ statement in it. She’d listen to the audio itself later, listen for the cracks and pauses and quirks that might give something away. But in the transcript there was no mention of women, relationships Summers might have had. No break-up. But then, that line: I don’t see him much, especially not since his father died. How well did his mother really know him? It sounded like Mrs Summers had been asking that herself.

  The light in the corridor was fading rapidly, and up ahead Birch thought she saw a shadow move, briefly, across one wall. She stopped. In spite of herself, she shivered. They always demolish the buildings where shootings take place, she thought. Too many ghosts. In the stillness, she listened for a shuffle or a footstep, but nothing came. Yet, yes – there it was again. Movement: a distortion of the dim, grey light. One of the SOCOs, still here? Or a cleaner, maybe?

  ‘Is someone up there?’

  Ahead of her, silence yawned. But just as she was about to shake herself and continue walking, a figure stepped out of one of the classroom doors, and into the corridor in front of her.

  Birch felt her heart accelerate. Her hand went to her hip: an old, habitual movement from many years of carrying a baton, though of course she didn’t have one now. The figure in front of her was indistinct, but she could see the person was slight. A woman, or a very slim man. A student? Could a student have hidden for this long, and gone undetected by the SOCO teams? Surely not, she thought.

  ‘Who is that?’ Her voice had a tremor in it.

  Above her, the corridor’s panel lighting began to clunk on, and the sudden change made her blink. When she focused, she could see who it was up ahead of her, maybe thirty feet away, leaning on the bank of light switches.

  ‘Hello, DS Birch.’

  Birch let out a long breath through her nose.

  ‘Grant Lockley,’ she said. ‘I suppose it was only a matter of time before you turned up.’

  Lockley took his hand off the switch and pressed it to his chest, a wounded gesture.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Birch was doing rapid mental arithmetic: How did he get in here? Has he contaminated the crime scene? ‘You’re as predictable as worms after rain.’

  ‘I take offence to that, Detective Sergeant,’ he said, but he was smiling.

  ‘You claim to know everything, Lockley.’ Birch began walking up the corridor towards him. ‘In particular, you know everything about me. So I know that you know I got my pips recently. I’m Detective Inspector now, this is my investigation, and I’d like to know who the hell let you get into the middle of it.’

  Lockley’s smile grew. It was a smile she’d come to know well – too well for her liking – though mercifully she hadn’t seen it in person for some years. Lockley had had his teeth in other people lately. He looked like a shark, Birch thought, with his sawn-off grin and his eyes just a little too far apart. There was no better career for him, really.

  ‘Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’ he said. ‘This college is a nightmare, security-wise. Even crawling with police personnel, it’s vulnerable. No one let me in, Detective Inspector. I found an unmanned door and simply let myself through.’

  Birch stopped walking. She was maybe four feet from him now, close enough to see the product in his hair. He looked the same as he always had, really – a little crinklier around the eyes, perhaps. But otherwise, the same. Standing this near to him made the hairs stand up on Birch’s arms. The encounter felt as risky, as intimately dispiriting, as running into an ex.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a serious oversight?’ Lockley was saying. ‘Since Dunblane, schools are all sealed up like Fort Knox. Yet there are students here who are still children – fifteen, sixteen years old – and no high security for them, eh? Anyone could have walked in here, easy as I did. People are going to question that. They’ll want to see heads roll . . . and campus security’s just the start of it.’

  In her hand, Birch’s phone buzzed again. McLeod, no doubt – he didn’t like to be kept waiting.

  ‘I bet it is,’ she said. ‘I bet you’ve got six months of hit-pieces lined up,
haven’t you, Lockley? This shooting’s a real turn-up for the books in terms of your career.’

  Lockley did, this time, look genuinely wounded.

  ‘I’m a public servant like you, Detective Inspector.’ He pronounced her title pointedly, spittily. ‘Free speech is a basic human right. People are desperate for the truth, and they want it without spin. I give them that. Can you say the same?’

  Birch rolled her eyes. She knew what was coming next – she could, had she wanted to, have mouthed the words in perfect sync as Lockley said them.

  ‘I’m just doing my job.’ That hands-up, what can I do? gesture. She remembered him feeding the same line to her mother one night, when he’d woken her going through the family’s bins, and scared her half to death. He’d ended up cornered by the back garden’s high wall, and he’d thrown up his hands in that exact same way, as though Birch’s grief-stricken mother might have thought to attack him. ‘I’m just doing my job, Mrs Birch. We all want the same thing, here – we all want to find Charlie.’

  Now, she found herself scowling.

  ‘As much as I’d love to stand here and discuss your virtues all evening,’ she said, ‘I have about five thousand more pressing things to do right now. So how about you let me escort you out of my crime scene? If you leave now, I’ll overlook any potential criminal intent on your part.’

  Lockley cast his gaze around the corridor, ignoring her.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘the main thing the public will want to know is why. Why did Ryan Summers do this? What makes a seemingly ordinary young man go out and kill a bunch of his classmates? And not just on impulse, either – in a cold, premeditated attack.’

  ‘We don’t know what this was yet,’ Birch said. Shit, she thought. Surely this investigation can’t already have a leak?

  Lockley raised an eyebrow.

  ‘This is Scotland. People don’t just have guns lying around the house. This kid went out and got himself one – and through highly illegal channels, I’ll wager.’

  She relaxed a little. Perhaps all Lockley had at this point was speculation; not that he ever needed much else.

  ‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘people will want to know why. And the answer will lie with the parents. It basically always does. Little Ryan wasn’t loved enough as a kid, maybe. Little Ryan was allowed to listen to violent rap music. Little Ryan’s dad died and he never got over it . . .’

  Lockley tilted his head like a bird’s.

  ‘Am I getting warm, DI Birch?’

  Birch forced her mouth into a hard line. She could not – could not – let her past encounters with this man interfere with her work. Not with a case this delicate. The investigation felt like a live grenade she was cradling in her hands; if she let him, she knew only too well that Lockley would rip the pin out and run.

  ‘We’re done talking, Lockley,’ she said.

  He shrugged. ‘For now, maybe. But if you think I’ll leave this investigation alone, rest assured, I won’t. I know you lot are mainly interested in a quiet life. You’ll want to close up this case for good and hope people forget about Ryan Summers, but I won’t let that happen. I’ll find out why he did this. If it turns out his mother knew it was coming, I’ll find out. If it turned out he had accomplices, I’ll find that out too. It’s my job to do that – just like your job is to put the bad guys away. I think our motivations for getting out of bed in the morning are roughly the same, really, aren’t they? I think I know you well enough to say that, what with our . . . personal history, and all.’

  For a moment, Birch’s hearing gave out, and her vision stuttered red, black, red.

  ‘My personal history,’ she said, through her teeth, ‘does not come to work with me . . . and I don’t want it mentioned. You understand?’

  Lockley looked down at the sleeve of his dark grey coat. It was corduroy, Birch noticed, and cheap. He pretended to see a speck of something, and brushed it away.

  ‘What I understand,’ he said, ‘is that your brother was exactly Ryan Summers’ age when everything went down. And your mother died just recently, am I right?’

  Birch drew herself up a little taller.

  ‘I won’t discuss my mother with you, Grant.’

  He was still smiling. He seemed always to be smiling, as though that smile were his work uniform.

  ‘It must be hard for you,’ he said, as if she hadn’t spoken, ‘thinking about Charlie all the time when you’re trying to focus on your work. And don’t tell me you’re not. It’s a little puzzling to hear you say you don’t bring your personal life to work with you when you also told the Scotsman newspaper – many moons ago, I admit – that your brother was the very reason you became a police officer.’

  Birch cursed inwardly. She hadn’t always been this wary of journalists, and had learned the hard way about making idle chit-chat with them.

  ‘My brother’s case has been cold for over a decade. You looked over every last scrap of the public record at the time, so you know there’s nothing there you could possibly write about – and if there were, I’d know about it long before you.’

  Birch took a long step towards him, into the shoving crowd of his aftershave, and lowered her voice.

  ‘I won’t let you hurt me again,’ she said.

  Lockley opened his mouth to speak, but as he did, the fire door at the end of the corridor swung open.

  ‘Birch?’ McLeod was framed in the doorway that led to the stairs. Lockley turned, and Birch watched the two men rearrange their faces as they recognised one another.

  ‘What the fuck?’ McLeod began stomping down the corridor towards them. ‘What the fuck is this degenerate doing in my crime scene?’

  Birch grimaced. Words would no doubt be had, later, about this.

  ‘He’s leaving,’ she said. She looked hard at Lockley. ‘Right this minute, sir.’

  Shooting

  At approximately 8.15 a.m. on the morning of the shooting, Ryan Summers was witnessed alighting from a bus at the main road entrance to the Tweed Campus. From there he walked to the south-west corner of the campus and entered the college buildings. Summers gained entry not via the main reception, but through a secondary entrance at the Jackie Stewart building, the college’s purpose-built engineering block where Summers spent much of his time as a student [6][7][10]. Summers was wearing dark-coloured clothing, including a long black hooded sweatshirt, under which was concealed a makeshift holster containing three identically modified blank-firing revolvers [10][12]. Summers was witnessed by several fellow students as he made his way through the Jackie Stewart building and entered a men’s bathroom. It is believed that he used the bathroom to check and load his weapons, and to put in earplugs [10][32].

  At approximately 8.30 a.m., Summers entered the Tweed Campus refectory and approached 19-year-old Abigail Hodgekiss, who was seated at a table with her boyfriend Jack Egan, 21, and five other students. Hodgekiss was in her first year of a HND qualification in Acting and Performance at Three Rivers College. After a brief exchange, Summers produced one of the three modified Bruni Olympic .380 BBM revolvers and fatally shot Hodgekiss at close range [10][12]. He then fired upon Jack Egan, who sustained a gunshot wound to the shoulder and fell to the ground. Egan was later treated in hospital and survived [13].

  Witnesses report that as chaos erupted in the refectory, Summers turned his revolver towards 20-year-old Mary-Ann McEwan and 19-year-old Dawn Black and shouted, ‘Put your hands up!’ [10]. McEwan and Black had been sitting at the same refectory table and were attempting to perform emergency first aid on Abigail Hodgekiss [15]. McEwan was yelling at Summers when Summers fatally shot Dawn Black, and then McEwan [10][14]. As Summers bent over to look at Hodgekiss, he was tackled by 17-year-old Liz Gill, who had recently enrolled as a BTEC student in Sports Coaching [15][16][17]. Gill attempted to disarm Summers, but during the scuffle Summers fatally shot her in the chest at point-blank range [15].

  Summers then fatally shot 27-year-old refectory counter assistant Kerry McNaughton,
a student on the college’s SVQ Level 1 Professional Cookery course [10][15]. McNaughton had been pulling other students to safety, encouraging them to take cover behind the refectory counter and then exit the building via the kitchen entrance [15][16]. Among the students who escaped this way was 23-year-old Ella Ostrowska, who placed the first 999 call from the scene [10][13][15].

  After killing McNaughton, Summers exited the refectory and walked in the direction of the building’s central stairwell, where he discarded the revolver he had used to shoot his first six victims [12]. Adult literacy tutor Isobel MacNab witnessed Summers entering the stairwell with the weapon in his hand as she unlocked a nearby computer lab for fleeing students to take refuge in [10][23]. From the computer lab MacNab placed a 999 call and some of the students with her sent tweets and Facebook messages describing what was happening [18][19][22].

  As he moved up the stairwell, Summers encountered 29-year-old Victoria Cho, an international student on the college’s HNC in Retail Management. Witnesses said that Cho approached Summers and spoke to him, not realising that he was the gunman [10]. Summers shot her twice with the second revolver, and she later died in hospital [20].

  Summers exited the central stairwell on the building’s first floor, where dozens of students were milling about [10]. Because the time was only approximately 8.40 a.m., the majority of the campus classrooms had not yet been unlocked for 9 a.m. classes [10][23]. Summers approached a group of female students and began firing apparently at random, killing 22-year-old Mhairi Crosbie and Sarah Reynolds, also 22 [10]. 21-year-old Leanne Lawrie was jostled in the ensuing panic, causing her to fall, hit her head against a radiator, and sustain a serious head injury [20][21]. She later died in hospital [10][20]. Witnesses reported hearing a clicking sound from the second revolver after these shots were fired, suggesting that Summers attempted to continue discharging the gun after the chamber was emptied [10][12][25].

  At approximately 8.45 a.m., Summers entered a women’s bathroom near the central stairwell on the first floor of the building [10]. Janitor Jim Robertson reported hearing cries for help from the bathroom as he ran along a first-floor corridor unlocking classrooms for students to hide in [23][24]. 25-year-old Evie Kesson, 22-year-old Catriona Brown, 22-year-old Gemma McGregor and 19-year-old Chantal Walker were all shot and killed, execution-style [32], in the first-floor bathroom [2][10]. Moments later, Summers shot himself in the right side of the head at point-blank range with his last round of ammunition [3][10][12][25].