Condition Purple

by Peter Turnbull

  The occupants next. The home owner and his wife. They were dressed neatly, he in a light-coloured shirt, a satin jacket, light trousers and cream and brown shoes. His thick leather belt with a heavy buckle seemed oddly out of place with the rest of his dress. He had a thin face, a good head of black hair, neatly combed. His lady wore a matching blue blouse and skirt, blue stockings and blue court shoes. Montgomerie asked if they were about to go out and apologized if his visit caused any inconvenience. No, they said, they were not going out, they were just sitting in this afternoon.

  They were dressed to perfection, in a house kept to perfection and which was surrounded by a garden kept to perfection. They were not expecting him. They always lived like this…they always lived like this. Montgomerie became afraid of even clearing his throat.

  He asked if he might sit down and after adjusting to the cramped and delicate feeling of the settee he inquired if they knew of one Stephanie Craigellachie.

  ‘Our foster daughter,’ said Mr Keys. He had a ‘thin’ voice. Menacing.

  ‘Our only one,’ echoed Mrs Keys. She had a whiny voice.

  Thin and menacing and whiny. Montgomerie felt himself beginning to crawl up the wall. He regretted that he might have some bad news for them.

  ‘How could she do this to us?’ said Mr Keys when Montgomerie had explained the reason for his visit.

  ‘After all we have done for her,’ echoed Mrs Keys.

  ‘She was always so selfish,’ Mr Keys said.

  ‘Very selfish,’ said his wife.

  Montgomerie thought she was in her mid-fifties, but could be hiding a lot of years under her make-up and hairdo. Her husband was clearly in his sixties but had a thin frame and carried the clothing of a thirty-year-old with only limited difficulty.

  ‘She grew up here?’ prompted Montgomerie when it became clear that the Keys were not only going to be unforthcoming with emotion and information, but were also quite happy, it seemed, to sit in silence staring at each other, basking in each other’s attention, which was, presumed Montgomerie, how they spent their days, cop or no cop on the settee.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Keys.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Keys.

  Another silence. Montgomerie knew he was going to have to work hard.

  ‘How long did she live with you?’

  ‘We rescued her from an awful children’s home which was full of rattling cutlery and yelling children when she was ten years old.’ Mr Keys gazed at his wife.

  ‘Ten years old,’ said Mrs Keys.

  Montgomerie suddenly realized that the Keys kept looking at each other even when speaking to him. He wondered with a sudden sense of fear and unease if it had been like this when Stephanie was growing up here? ‘How was school today?’ would ask Mrs Keys of her husband as Stephanie walked into the room.

  ‘We brought her here.’

  ‘Here,’ echoed Mrs Keys.

  ‘And we brought her up as it was our Christian duty to do so.’

  ‘Our duty.’

  You are not ringing true, thought Montgomerie. You are not ringing true at all.

  Then there was a silence again. Just the rapid and faint ticking of the cuckoo clock provided any sound. The only movement in the room was the small silver thing which went round and round and round. The Keys sat in a virtually catatonic state, gazing across the room into each other’s eyes. Thirty seconds passed.

  ‘It will be necessary for one of you at least to attend the mortuary and identify the body,’ said Montgomerie when it became clear the Keys were not interested enough to ask any questions, and to break the silence, and to take his mind off the mesmeric spinning toy.

  ‘I will do that,’ said Mr Keys.

  ‘My husband will do that,’ said Mrs Keys.

  ‘She was stabbed,’ said Montgomerie. ‘Just to warn you that there will be a wound on the neck which could be visible. Usually they just expose the face and nothing else.’

  ‘We wondered when you were going to tell us how she died,’ said Mrs Keys.

  ‘Well, now you know,’ Montgomerie said testily. ‘Do you know much about her lifestyle?’

  ‘Little,’ said Mr Keys.

  Mrs Keys remained silent.

  ‘Did you meet any of her friends? We are particularly keen to trace a man called “Dino” who could be a man or a woman, but we are inclined to think it’s a male.’

  ‘Why?’ Mr Keys glanced momentarily at Montgomerie and then returned his gaze to his wife.

  Montgomerie faltered, searching for an answer. He faltered because not only was the question unexpected given the impression Montgomerie was forming of the couple, but because it was difficult to know how to describe the tattoo, especially its location on their foster daughter’s anatomy, and especially to the Keys who had up to that moment seemed so prim and twee. But he also faltered because the question had been thrown with a sharpness and a quality of accusation which had caught him off guard, and moreover when Keys looked at him Montgomerie looked into the man’s eyes, and just for a second, a split second, he glimpsed the man’s soul.

  The man was evil.

  ‘I’d rather not say,’ said Montgomerie, beginning to feel a worm of doubt and fear growing in him, a fear of being in a potentially dangerous situation; this perfect Legoland house was in fact fraught with danger. Mr Keys was not to be underestimated, the very core of his personality was demonic. Montgomerie looked at Keys who was once again sitting still looking adoringly at his wife, all in blue. Montgomerie wondered whether or not he had seen the look in the man’s eyes. He decided that he had.

  Keys grunted an acceptance of Montgomerie’s explanation.

  ‘So,’ said Montgomerie, ‘did Stephanie mention a Dino to you at all?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Keys.

  ‘Never,’ said his wife.

  ‘Do you know where she lived?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Keys. ‘We have her address.’

  ‘In Kelvinbridge,’ said Mrs Keys.

  ‘Did you visit?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you had, I think you would have found it a little different from your home here,’ said Montgomerie.

  No response. The Keys evidently expected an explanation would be forthcoming and seemed prepared to wait for it. They were, as they had said, sitting in for the afternoon and in no hurry. The cuckoo clock ticked and the chrome thing went round and round and the fish tank bubbled.

  ‘She didn’t have a great deal of money,’ said Montgomerie.

  ‘She told us that she was unemployed,’ Keys said in what was to be the only unsolicited statement he made.

  ‘She was, in a sense.’ Montgomerie grasped the opportunity for a rapport. ‘In that she was not employed as such. She was drawing benefit as an unemployed person but she was bringing in much more money than I do each week.’ Mrs Keys looked up, caught her breath and proved that she was capable of independent thought.

  ‘Oh, sir, you’re not suggesting she was a criminal, or worse…not one of those girls who stand in Blythswood Street.’

  ‘The second, I’m afraid,’ said Montgomerie.

  Mrs Keys pulled out a small handkerchief with flowers embroidered on the corner and rushed out of the room fighting back tears.

  ‘You’ve upset my wife,’ said Keys coldly, flatly, unemotionally, but not moving an inch, not even taking his eyes from the chair his wife had been occupying, content it seemed to wait for her eventual return.

  Chapter 5

  Wednesday, 16.00-19.30 hours

  Sussock left his flat and walked down to Byres Road. He bought something sticky and unsubstantial from a fast food joint and then he walked back and washed the grease from his hands. He fixed himself a coffee and drove to the other side of the water, to Rutherglen. He didn’t relish the prospect of the visit he was to make. He told himself that he ought to be used to it by now, he’d had occasion to call back once a week or ten days since he had walked out, months ago, right in the middle of the Glasgow K
nife Murders case as he recalled, when snow lay deep and cruel in the very dead of winter. At the age of fifty-five years he walked out of his marriage, at an age when couples should be enjoying each other’s company with their life’s work and child-rearing behind them. But not him, he’d walked and he still felt the wonderful sense of pressure being suddenly lifted from his shoulders. His leaving had been sudden, spontaneous, impetuous, and he had to call back frequently to the bungalow he had shared with the lady who was his wife in name only. All too frequently for comfort.

  In Rutherglen he drew up in front of a modest bungalow, left his car, walked up the drive and hammered on the door of the building. He was in no mood for diplomacy. The house was in silence but he knew the routine. He knew it line well. He could picture them, upon his knock throwing a glance at each other and possibly sniggering. Perhaps they even saw him coming up the drive and Sammy would say, ‘Quick, Mummy, it’s him. Let’s hide and pretend we’re not at home.’ They might even have crawled quickly underneath the dining-room table together.

  So he hammered on the door again. This time he succeeded in raising a howl from the interior. Then he heard footsteps inside the house and approaching the front door. The key turned in the lock and then his son’s mincy voice called out, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘You know fine well who it is,’ snarled Sussock. ‘Just open the door.’

  The door opened but only after a needling pause. Samuel stood there, tall, thin, two rings in his left ear and his jersey—even in summer he wore a jersey—was tucked into the waist of his baggy trousers. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ he said. Sussock started up the steps and pushed passed him. Samuel cowered needlessly.

  ‘Is it him?’ a piercing female voice wailed from the sitting-room.

  ‘Yes, Mummy,’ Samuel replied as he ran behind Sussock with hurried little footsteps.

  The woman flew out of the room. She was small and pinched-faced. She glared at Sussock as they confronted each other in the hallway. ‘What are you doing here? You! You were never interested in me or Sammy, was he, Sammy, never at home, out catching robbers all the time and drinking with his mates…and…and…’

  But Sussock just turned and went to a small room where all his possessions had been dumped. He raked through the collection of cardboard boxes and collected items of summer clothing which he stuffed into a plastic bag. Samuel stood in the doorway with one hand on his hip. ‘Why don’t you take it all, Daddy, or is your flat not big enough? I’ve a boyfriend who’s looking for a room, and Mummy likes him too.’

  ‘Not be long now,’ said Sussock icily.

  ‘Not be long before what, Daddy?’

  ‘Not be long before it’s all finalized. Not be long before the divorce is through, then I can instruct my solicitor to raise an action for division and sale. Sell the house, pay off the balance of the mortgage and split the proceeds with that thing in there. Then you’ll be on your own and I mean your own.’

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ Samuel smiled. ‘You’re so handsome when you’re angry.’

  Sussock left the house in a cold fury. He drove thankfully to Langside, calming with each turn of the wheels. The tension he had built up inside him prior to the encounter with his wife and son was now leaving him in waves. In Langside he pulled up outside a close and climbed the stair. Three up he came to a door, on the right, with ‘Willems’ inscribed in gold on a fancy tartan nameplate, just above the letterbox. He rang the doorbell.

  She opened it. Her hair was let down, long and golden, to her shoulders. She wore a rugby shirt of green and yellow in horizontal stripes, figure-hugging stonewashed denims, and trainers. She smiled and said, ‘Hi. Hi, old Sussock,’ and hooked her finger under the knot of his tie and pulled him gently into her flat. ‘I expected you this morning. You’re late.’

  He kissed her. ‘Just felt too tired when I got in,’ he said. ‘I flaked out. Couldn’t phone.’

  She rotated him and hipped the door shut.‘Thought that was what had happened. You’re forgiven, old Sussock.’

  Later as he lay alone in her bed he looked around the room. Elka Willems’s flat was tastefully decorated, he had always thought so. It was painted in pastel shades, books on shelves, a Van Gogh print on the wall. Her flat was a ‘room and kitchen’, just one room and a kitchen, an ideal-sized flat for one person living alone, but it had originally been intended as a family home and Sussock had in fact grown up in such a flat in the old Gorbals, the ‘old town’, as one of seven children, sharing the one bed with their parents, spilling on to the floor as they grew older, nits in their hair, shorn and daubed by the medical officer, lice in their clothing, parents passing coal gas through milk as a cheap and effective intoxicant, or drinking the lethal ‘red biddie’, the screams in the night and in the morning the pool of dried congealed blood on the common stair. Sussock was well aware that some people, many people in fact, had fond memories of the old Gorbals but he was not one of them, not being at all sorry to see them come down. In their place the city had erected three huge high-rise tower blocks and if duty ever took him there he’d often take time out, answering a tug, to walk over the old ground. The street pattern of the old Gorbals largely remained, as do some of the old bars on Pollokshaws Road, but apart from the tower blocks the site was now a waste ground with the new Sheriff Court ‘the busiest in Europe’, to the north, the railway viaduct to the south, main drags to east and west. On a winter’s day it was a desolate and bleak square mile.

  That was the Gorbals. This was Langside, summertime, warm, well ordered, clean vacuumed, wood polished, with Mozart playing on the hi-fi.

  She came into the room. He loved to see her naked, so perfectly formed, everything in proportion.

  ‘Two coffees,’ she said with a tone of disapproval in her voice.

  ‘Well, it’ll be wine after this run at night shifts.’

  She bent down and placed his mug on the bedside cabinet. As she turned away he gave her bottom a playful slap. She yelped ‘Ouch!’ and smiled and carried her coffee across the floor and stood in front of the tall windows, looking out on to the street below. Net curtains hid her from view but allowed her to gaze out at Langside.

  Sussock leaned up in the bed sipping his coffee. He looked at her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her and her form was such that she kept the eye moving. He thought her perfect, from the front, from the side and as in this case from behind. And still just twenty-seven years old.

  Then he lay back and looked at the ceiling which he had repainted for her at the very beginning of the summer. He thought of the women in his life, the shrew in Rutherglen, this Nordic goddess in Langside who was young enough to be his daughter and who hadn’t come quietly, officer. The absurd black and white of it.

  Montgomerie drove Leopold Keys to the GRI. He escorted him to the mortuary, walking in the bowels of the huge hospital, thick industrial lino, pipes running along the roof of the corridor, doors set back, some with radio-activity warning signs on them.

  He opened the door to the mortuary and entered the anteroom. The attendant stood as they entered.

  Montgomerie showed his identification. He said, ‘Stephanie Craigellachie, please.’

  The attendant nodded and showed them into the mortuary itself. He walked to a drawer, one of a bank of metal drawers set in the wall, and pulled it outwards. He parted the cloth which covered the face of the deceased, believed to be Stephanie Craigellachie.

  ‘That is my foster daughter,’ said Leopold Keys, with not the slightest trace of emotion that Montgomerie could detect.

  Returning in the car, Montgomerie asked what sort of girl she had been.

  ‘A difficult, wayward child.’ Leopold Keys stared straight ahead as Montgomerie drove up Maryhill Road towards Bearsden. ‘But we gave her a good home and did our duty as we saw fit.’

  As we saw fit. Alarm bells began to ring in the distant recesses of Montgomerie’s mind.

  ‘When did she leave your home?’

  ‘At sixteen,’ said the impeccably dressed Leop
old Keys.

  ‘So early?’

  ‘Well, she was never really happy in Bearsden. She came from Possilpark, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Montgomerie, grasping the opportunity to provoke some spontaneity in Keys.

  ‘Well, there is a social gap,’ said Leopold Keys. ‘Stephanie never seemed to adjust to our ways. She was found by the police in a house in Possilpark when she was seven. Her parents had just left her there, turned the key and walked away. Never seen again. She was in the house for two days, no food, just tap water. Three years in a children’s home toughened her up, she was swearing like a trooper when she came to us. We managed to knock off a few rough edges…’

  Knock off a few rough edges. Again the warning bells sounded distantly.

  ‘It was an uphill struggle. She was a street-smart, tough little kid when we got her, no table manners, never cleaned her shoes unless she was really made to. She wore Mrs Keys into the ground.’

  ‘You don’t have children of your own?’

  ‘No. We can’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s one of those things we have had to learn to live with. Stephanie was a challenge, more of a challenge than we bargained for. If we had been able to have her when she was younger it would have been easier, but by the time we got her she was set in her ways. A very obstinate girl.’

  ‘What do you do?’ asked Montgomerie.