Condition Purple

by Peter Turnbull

  Donoghue reached forward, grabbed the phone and dialled a two-figure internal number.

  ‘Montgomerie,’ replied a crisp, clipped voice.

  ‘DI Donoghue.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What have you got on at the moment?’

  ‘Writing up, sir,’ replied Montgomerie. ‘Visit to the deceased’s flat, interview with her flatmate, contact with my snout.’

  ‘Come up with anything?’

  ‘Not a lot, sir.’ Montgomerie cleared his throat. ‘Most interesting information is a reference to a squad called the Black Team. I’ve never heard of them before, but they would appear to be a group of retired ladies who prey on the working girls, those still young enough to work, the teenagers and those in their early twenties. By “retired” I mean over thirty. Could be a lead.’

  ‘Could indeed.’ Donoghue laid his pipe down. ‘Could indeed. I’d like you to contact the uniform branch, please, and organize a sweep of the building site next to the alley, paying particular attention to the area close to the wooden fence. It occurred to me that she may have tossed her money over the fence before she was murdered. If she tossed her money she may also have thrown something else which could be of use to us.’

  ‘Very good, sir. I’ll get right on it.’

  Donoghue replaced the telephone receiver. He thought about the Black Team. Yes, could indeed be interesting.

  He returned his attention to the contents of Stephanie Craigellachie’s handbag. A packet of tissues: he took each separate tissue from the wrapper and examined it, nothing hidden in the packet among the tissues. Half a dozen heavy duty condoms, a comb with a spiked handle, a spray of hair lacquer, both defensive weapons—essential equipment for a working girl, a packet of cigarettes, medium tar, and again nothing in the packet beside the nails. A cigarette lighter, plastic, disposable, marked ‘Corfu’. Nothing else, nothing certainly as interesting as an address book with an entry under D for Dino.

  He picked up Dr Kay’s report on the forensic tests conducted on the clothing of the deceased. It did not surprise him that she noted the underclothing to be ‘heavily stained with semen and female discharge’. Dr Kay could say little about the clothing other than that it was old, inexpensive and unclean.

  The murder weapon also lay on Donoghue’s desk, carefully wrapped in cellophane and neatly labelled. It was an ordinary five-inch-bladed wooden-handled kitchen knife, every home has one, and it is largely because of that that it is also Scotland’s number one murder weapon. It easily comes to hand during domestic disputes, which for some reason most often occur in the kitchen of a home, and such a knife is easily concealed in the jeans pocket of the sixteen-year-old son of the householder: he picks it up, goes out for the evening and gets into a fight. Elliot Bothwell had not been able to lift any latents whatsoever from the blade or the handle and could only regretfully conclude in his report that the killer wore gloves during the attack. Dr Kay in her report could only confirm that the blood on the blade and handle coincided with the blood group of the deceased as provided in information contained in the post mortem report.

  Not a great deal to go on. Donoghue took his pipe from his mouth and scraped the waste ash into the ashtray. Just a dead heroin addict in a city of three million people, one fatal blow to her throat which could have been accidental, which in turn meant that the killer might never be traced if it was nothing more than an opportunist attack, one very curious tattoo naming a man or a woman called Dino who might or might not be implicated. No money on the girl’s person. It was just a cheap, senseless mugging, Donoghue kept coming back to that possibility and just as quickly kept veering away again. No, she couldn’t have run into the alley to escape a mugger or the Black Team. He thought that he would like to know a little more about the Black Team, he’d like to know more about the man in the black car who seemed to have terrified Stephanie Craigellachie herself, the scarlet woman who like so many people in his professional life was already, as the ambulance crews would code it, ‘condition purple’ by the time he first heard their name or knew they existed. Had existed.

  ‘Aren’t you taking the dog a walk today, Dino, you always do when you work at home? You said you’d work in the study, you know you said you’d work in the study because you mess up the living-room with your files, and have you paid the paper bill for last week, you know Mr Lennie is always too polite to ask and things must be tight for him in that little shop?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Dino and took Sam to the grounds of the Burrell Collection and let him romp while he sat on the grass and watched the coachloads of trippers come and go. Then the springer spaniel nuzzled up close to him.

  Suddenly the dog seemed the only substantial thing in his life. He said, ‘Where is she, Sam? Where has she gone?’

  The sunlight woke Sussock, streaming in through the thin faded curtains. He awoke slowly. It still felt unnatural to wake in the afternoon. Even now after a working life governed by shifts he had never, and doubted that he ever would, get used to going to bed and waking up again on the same day. He drew the palms of his hands down over his lean hungry face and realized that at the age of fifty-five the normal pattern of life wherein one wakes with each new day had been something he had not largely shared in. Waking each day in the morning would be the novelty in his retirement, the compensation for just one more privation of being a cop. He glanced at his watch: 03.05 p.m.

  Six hours’ sleep. Not bad. He could cope with six hours’ sleep. It gave him seven hours before signing on again for the graveyard shift at 10.00 p.m.

  He rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of trousers. As he did so he became aware of music penetrating the wall, not loudly, but penetrating just the same. It came from the left-hand wall, from the room occupied by the two boys who wore their jerseys tucked into their trousers and who might be seen walking late at night in Kelvinway, just strolling, and approaching cars which pulled up alongside them. Occasionally seen walking in our out of the gloom of the parkland at either side of the Kelvinway.

  Sussock wondered if their music had woken him and not the sunlight. As he did so he felt a sudden flood of anger that his personal space had been invaded. But the music was low, it was as low as could reasonably be expected. It was the paper thin walls that let in the sound, not the boys’ antisocial behaviour, and he had had six hours’ sleep. The sun was streaming in, he had always been light-sensitive, finding it easy to rise in the summer and next to impossible in the winter. So, he told himself, it was the sun that woke him.

  He switched on his radio to drown out the boys’ music and to control his own personal space. He left his room and went along to the bathroom he shared with three other flats. He found that somebody had shaved and had left their whiskers all over the wash-hand basin.

  Montgomerie stood next to the sergeant of the uniformed branch. The site foreman stood next to the sergeant. They watched a line of constables in white short-sleeved shirts pick their way over the rubble.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Montgomerie looked across the broad chest of the sergeant towards the site foreman.

  ‘Gutting,’ said the foreman. He wore a yellow hard hat, was stripped to the waist with a huge beer belly flopping over the belt of his jeans. ‘We have to retain the frontage.’ He nodded behind him and the wall which loomed above them. ‘Got to retain the front of the building, the Victorian line, but we can do what we like behind. It’ll be a bonny building when we’re done, sell it nae bother, nae bother at all—all the benefits of modern building technology inside and all the grace of an old architectural design at the front, not just slabs of concrete and sheets of glass but real masonry.’

  Montgomerie glanced behind him at the crew who sat on piles of rubble and leaned on picks, watching the searching cops.

  The foreman followed Montgomerie’s gaze. ‘No reason why they shouldn’t continue working,’ he said wryly, ‘but they won’t, any excuse will do. I know, I used to be one of them, but you get promotion and see how your
attitude changes.’

  The line of cops worked up by the yellow fence. Occasionally a cop would stoop, pick something up, examine it and then toss it away. Then one cop in the middle of the line seemed to Montgomerie to snatch at something on the ground. He glanced at it quickly and left the line, stepping nimbly across the site and approached Montgomerie. ‘Found this, sir.’

  He handed Montgomerie a wallet.

  ‘Found on the site, sir,’ said Montgomerie.

  Donoghue turned the wallet over in his hands.

  ‘The squad is still on the site, sir,’ said Montgomerie as an afterthought. ‘But I think that may be what we’re looking for.’

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Donoghue, slowly emptying the contents of the wallet on to his desktop. ‘Take a seat, please.’

  Montgomerie sat. He was not, he knew, wholly in the Detective-Inspector’s favour and being asked to sit instead of being kept standing was an unusual and valued sign of approval.

  ‘Have you looked at the contents, Montgomerie?’

  Montgomerie shook his head. ‘No, sir, brought it straight as soon as I saw the name Stephanie Craigellachie inside.’

  ‘Good man,’ Donoghue examined the wallet’s contents. Nearly £200.00 in cash, a cellophane packet, creased and worn and containing isolated grains of yellow powder which Donoghue assumed to be the remnants of a sizeable and valuable bulk of heroin, a letter to Stephanie Craigellachie with a printed address on the top right hand corner, an address in Stirling Way, Bearsden. He read it. It was a short, somewhat sour note, he thought, advising Stephanie that ‘Father’ had been in hospital, not serious, just observation, out now, ‘doubt if you’d be interested anyway, but I’m telling you just the same’. It was signed ‘Mother’.

  ‘Breakthrough,’ said Donoghue.

  ‘Sir?’

  Donoghue skimmed the letter across the desktop towards Montgomerie, who read it and nodded.

  ‘Want me to get on it, sir?’

  ‘Yes, if you would.’ Donoghue lit his pipe. ‘It’s not a two-hander, go and see what you can dig up and then do the formal identification number. Never pleasant, but it has to be done.’

  Montgomerie stood and left Donoghue’s office, pulling the door gently shut behind him.

  The money, Stephanie Craigellachie’s night’s earnings, a cellophane packet which once contained smack, now empty. So had she run out, was she strung out and biting through the flesh of her fingers until her supplier showed? Donoghue handled the cellophane packet with care; if they were in luck enough prints could be lifted to nail the pusher. Then there was the sour, ice-cold letter from ‘Mother’.

  Donoghue examined the wallet itself. It was old, of tooled leather, a man’s wallet which opened like a book. He noticed the lining was torn. He pulled the lining away from the leather. There was a photograph inside, a colour print, showing a middle-aged man who looked to be about forty-five, he wore light trousers, black shirt, he seemed to have a gold medallion hanging around his neck. He had golden hair which he had combed over his scalp from left to right as if to cover a bald patch. He had his arm round a blonde-haired girl of perhaps thirty years. Maybe more. She was dressed cheaply. Too tight skirt for her years. Too tight and too short. The photograph was taken out of town, though clearly somewhere in the West of Scotland.

  The couple were leaning against a black Mercedes. On the reverse a neat female hand had written ‘Jimmy “the Rodent” and Toni, a week before she disappeared’. Also in the wallet, wedged in the corner, was a book of matches taken from a dive called Sylvester’s.

  ‘Breakthrough,’ said Donoghue, ‘breakthrough on all fronts.’

  ‘Have you no got a copy of this?’ asked the excited scratcher, holding up the photo. ‘It’s rare, so it is.’

  ‘No,’ said King.

  ‘Sure?’ He was a young man with black hair and keen eyes. ‘It’s rare, so it is.’

  ‘Sure I’m sure.’ King sat in the man’s studio. Even to his untrained eyes it was noticeably more amateurish, more shoestring and sealing-wax, than the first studio he had visited. Here there were cups full of dried ink, discarded gloves, a slight smell of sweat and all artificial light. ‘I take it that you haven’t seen this before?’

  The man shook his head but continued to grin none the less. ‘No,’ he said eventually.

  ‘So you didn’t do it?’

  The scratcher shot a keen glance at King. ‘Do you think I’d forget a job like this, pal? “I belong to Dino.” Lucky old Dino, eh?’

  ‘But you’d do something like that if someone asked?’

  ‘Oh sure, sure. I’d tattoo them anywhere. If they want it they get it, any design anywhere. If they come in steaming drunk and want a pink butterfly put on the middle of their forehead, then they get it. If they don’t think it was such a good idea in the cold light of day, then that’s their problem. See, me, I’m in business, I give the customer what he wants. If I didn’t do it someone else would. Can’t pay the tallyman if you turn good business down, my man.’

  ‘Been in this game long?’

  ‘Six months. I’m doing OK. Used to drive a taxi for the man, before that I was a steel erector. I fancied going it alone so I bought this equipment second-hand and set myself up.’

  ‘No training?’

  ‘Practised on oranges for a week, then I opened for business.’

  ‘Keeping it clean I hope,’ said King. ‘Could be the Environmental Health could shut you down if they don’t like what they see.’

  The man shrugged. ‘I give the place a good wash down with disinfectant every once in a while.’

  ‘Every once in a while,’ King echoed. ‘So tell me, if you didn’t do this do you know anyone who might have done it?’

  ‘Bit blurred, isn’t it,’ said the man, ‘the letters I mean, not the photograph, as clear as daylight is the photograph, sure you couldn’t run me off a copy?’

  ‘No chance.’ King’s voice hardened. ‘Don’t waste any time by asking again.’

  ‘I’ve given them tattoos in some places, Jim, but never there…’

  ‘So who might have?’

  ‘You could try Old Fat Charlie,’ said the scratcher. ‘He’s got a place in the next street, looks a bit like a scrappie’s yard, gate and a corrugated iron fence.’

  ‘They get worse,’ said King.

  The man handed King the photograph with noticeable reluctance.

  King walked round to Old Fat Charlie’s place. The houses in Bridgeton were dry, courtesy of summertime; in the winter he knew that he could do this same walk and smell the damp coming from the houses. But now it was summer, windows were open, music blasted loudly, children screamed in play, the communal front gardens filled up with rubbish, discarded cans of super lager and empty Buckfast Abbey wine bottles, hypodermic syringes, paper caked in dried glue. King found Old Fat Charlie’s place without difficulty. It was as the young scratcher described, a hut behind a corrugated iron fence on which was painted ‘Old Fat Charlie. Tattoo Artist’. King tried the gate. It was locked.

  ‘He’s no in.’

  King turned. The owner of the voice was a derelict who sat slumped against the street lamp, feet in the gutter between two parked cars.

  ‘When will he be?’

  The derelict shrugged and spat. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Business is slow so he went to Delayney’s.’

  King looked at the iron fence. He wasn’t surprised business was slow. He thought of Delayney’s. He didn’t know to which particular Delayney’s bar Old Fat Charlie had gone but each was identical and each geared to nothing but hard drinking for men. Delayney’s ran a string of bars, all of the same name, selling only cheap wines and spirits and short measures of either. King knew that if Old Fat Charlie had gone to a Delayney’s bar he would be slumped against the gantry or leaning against a pillar, a glass of wine in one hand and glass of whisky in the other, enjoying oblivion and probably about to slide heavily on to the floor.

  It was, King thought, hardly worth his while l
ooking for him.

  ‘Got ten pence for a cup of tea, sojer?’ groaned the derelict.

  King handed the man a fifty-pence piece. He didn’t normally give money to down-and-outs but this time he did. The man had after all been of assistance to the police.

  The couple surprised Montgomerie. And he disliked them.

  The house first. He didn’t like the house. At least he did not like the way it had been decorated. From the outside there was nothing to distinguish it from any other suburban box in Bearsden where, as Karen had just that morning said, ‘even the muggers say “please”’. The house was a bungalow with a dormer window built into the roof, a room in what had been the attic. The building was of white-painted pebbledash with a yellow door. The street number was forged in wrought iron and fastened to the front of the house, and underneath the number was the name of the house, Clovelly, which was similarly fashioned out of wrought iron. The garden in front of the house was neat. Too neat really, close-cropped lawn, flowerbeds of dainty flowers, pansies particularly, a gravel drive down which two sets of flagstones were laid leading up to the garage door, and which were obviously carefully swept. Montgomerie thought that a weed growing in the flowers, or a pebble on the flagstones, could have been a welcome sight. There were of course the garden gnomes, two of them, and a miniature castle for them to sit beside, snugly among the pansies.

  Montgomerie walked up to the door and pressed the bell. It played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and brought two Pekinese yapping at the letterbox.

  The inside of the house exuded the same feeling of fastidious neatness and obsession with trivia. The furniture was modern, light, not at all comfortable, and seemed to be somewhat scaled down in size. The pink carpet was wall to wall and deep pile. The television was allowed to protrude into the room. Mass-produced prints hung on the wall and the household possessed one that never failed to irritate Montgomerie: it showed the face of an angelic-looking child, round-eyed and with a tear running down his cheek. The room seemed to be dominated by items of idle amusement: a fish tank with fish and a sign in the gravel which said ‘no fishing’, a little menagerie of glass animals parading along the mantelpiece or grouped round the electric logs, a chrome-plated silver thing which seemed to Montgomerie to serve no purpose other than to spin slowly, silently, mesmerically. A cuckoo clock hung on the wall. There was of course no music playing, the house was as dry as death, and no sound from the outside. The double glazing saw to that.