Condition Purple

by Peter Turnbull

  Donoghue caught his breath.

  ‘Oh, it gets worse, Mr Donoghue. When her foster parents sat down to roast beef she stood at the table in front of beans on toast, because she was fostered. Their home was apparently lavishly furnished but Stephanie’s room was threadbare, cheap furnishing and no form of heating even in the winter. Worse was the physical abuse: something went missing from the house and off would come the man’s belt, and not a few times. She showed me once, even at the age of twenty-one she still had the white marks on the back of her legs where the buckle of his belt had broken her skin all those years ago.’

  ‘Oh, that makes me very angry,’ said Donoghue quietly.

  ‘Doesn’t it. Then there was the verbal abuse, getting called a “slag” from the age of twelve, for example. The foster home was in Bearsden but she was bussed to school in Possilpark.’

  ‘Because she was fostered.’

  ‘That’s it. And you know what Possilpark and Saracen are like, a hotbed of drugs.’

  ‘I know fine.’

  ‘So Stephanie at the age of sixteen years was convinced she was worthless and had a head full of problems, and so when somebody gave her a bag of white powder and said, “If you want your problems to go away, try this.” She did.’

  ‘So she was a heroin addict at sixteen.’

  Dino Bawtry nodded. ‘And who could blame her? Eventually she worked the street, came by way of petty larceny, shoplifting, breaking into cars, and when she hadn’t got money she sat in her miserable bedsit doubled up with cramps and smelling of vinegar.’

  ‘Vinegar?’

  ‘Apparently she bought heroin in a soluble solution in which it was “cut” with vinegar. She used to inject it, puncturing herself in her neck and groin as well as her arms. If she cold turkey’d the smell of vinegar would come out of the pores of her skin. Once she bit through the skin of her finger, she was so strung out.’

  ‘How long have you known her?’

  ‘Going on a year. In that time, see, all the offers I had made to help her, but she had to come off the heroin, she couldn’t do it. Even though she hated the street, hated herself, hated what she was doing she just wouldn’t leave go. In a sense it was too easy, she was new and young and attractive, she could earn money. That caused her problems in itself.’

  ‘The Black Team, you mean.’

  ‘That’s not a name I’ve heard of, Mr Donoghue.’

  ‘It’s apparently a group of older women who mug the younger ones.’

  ‘Yes, she told me about them. I didn’t know they were called that. She was rolled on a couple of occasions and had to stay out until five or six o’clock the following morning, working the casinos, mostly Chinese men at that time of day, she said they can be real rough handlers. After that she went home halfway through each evening and deposited her earnings so if she was rolled she would only lose half a night’s money.’

  ‘Sensible. Did she work each evening?’

  ‘Well, she was a smackhead—she had to. You can always tell which girls are the heroin addicts, they are the ones who shiver in doorways wearing next to nothing when there’s snow on the ground or the sleet is driving down, I’ve seen them standing there on Christmas night and Ne’er day night. The girls who come out in the summer two or three evenings a week, they’re casuals, looking for pocket money. I couldn’t make up my mind about the casuals. I couldn’t help seeing them as exploiting as much as they were exploited. But Stephanie and girls like her…’ Dino Bawtry shook his head. ‘I mean, they have no choice.’

  Donoghue pulled gently on his pipe.

  ‘So Stephanie and I got to know each other, we met during the day and I bought her meals; she was emaciated and didn’t eat properly. So then she thanked me. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true, she thanked me in the only way she knew. All that she thought herself to be was a body to be used by men so she had herself tattooed, but tattooed on her groin. She had “I belong to Dino” tattooed on her groin. She told me. I never saw it, I didn’t want to see it.’

  ‘We saw it at the post mortem,’ said Donoghue. ‘And we spoke to the tattooist who did the art work. She paid him with her body, she gave him three freebies.’

  Again Dino Bawtry shook his head. ‘She had such a low opinion of herself, she could not see herself as anything other than a piece of property to be owned or rented out. I kept on at her to at least get herself tested for AIDS, but she refused. I think she was frightened of being told that she had it.’

  ‘It’s not an uncommon attitude.’

  ‘You know, Mr Donoghue, the thing that really reached me was that that life of hers, abandoned by her natural parents, sustained abuse of every kind in her foster home, heroin addiction at sixteen, no breaks in life, constant brushes with the law, a few weeks here and there in Cornton Vale hadn’t hardened her. If she was a cold and a hard personality I could understand why, but she wasn’t—she was warm, friendly, concerned for others. It was as if all the cruelty and exploitation and pain and humiliation could not destroy what was basically a good-natured personality. So then she wasn’t on the street any more, no one knew where she had gone, and all I saw were the other girls and I thought: They all must have a background the same as Stephanie’s because even the casuals must have a profound sense of lack of worth to do what they do.’

  Dino Bawtry took another cigarette from his packet and again Donoghue reached forward and proffered his lighter.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Donoghue, ‘did Stephanie ever mention a girl called Toni Durham or a man called Fingers McLelland?’

  ‘The man, no,’ said Bawtry, ‘not by name, anyway, but she did mention Toni by name. She makes films, so Stephanie said.’

  ‘Blue movies,’ said Donoghue. ‘Stephanie was in some.’

  ‘She told me she done something like that. She preferred it, it was safer than getting into cars with strange men.’

  ‘Did she mention the name of her supplier.’

  ‘No, not by name, just said that her supplier was female.’ Then Bawtry looked startled. ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Not by name, but it was that girl Toni Durham.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, I remember, she said one time, she said, “My supplier’s making me do films. I don’t mind, it’s safer than the street, I don’t get money, I’m getting some smack.”

  ‘Earlier she had told you that her supplier was female?’

  ‘Yes. It seems she had to work the street to pay for heroin, and then her supplier offered her a part in a film for which she would be paid in powder.’

  ‘Her supplier evidently being Toni Durham.’

  ‘That’s it. Do you know this Toni Durham? You going to nail her?’

  ‘Somebody got there before us,’ said Donoghue. ‘It seems that the heroin Toni Durham gave to Stephanie wasn’t Toni’s to give. It belonged to a man called Fingers.’

  There was a gentle tap on the door of Donoghue’s office. Abernethy entered, young, very fresh-faced for a CID cop. He excused himself and asked to speak to the Inspector in private. In the corridor Abernethy informed Donoghue that the Airport Police had just telephoned. They had detained a man called McLelland who had arrived on the 18.00 hours flight from Hamburg.

  ‘Ask them to hold him,’ said Donoghue. ‘We’ll be right down.’

  ‘We, sir?’

  ‘We, sir. You and me, sir.’

  The small man in the grey suit and red tie said, ‘My client wishes to say nothing.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ said Purdue, also known as McLelland. ‘I’m my own man. I say what I please.’ He was a short, stocky man, the same man in the photograph with Toni Durham and the black Mercedes, the same hard eyes, the same gouged face, lumps of dead skin and scars.

  ‘Well then, I can be of no further assistance.’ The solicitor stood. ‘Gentlemen.’

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ said Donoghue.

  A uniformed officer of the Airport Police opened the door and the solicitor left the
room.

  ‘See those guys,’ said Purdue, ‘see them.’

  ‘So tell us why you did it?’

  ‘Did what?’

  ‘Little point in denying it,’ said Donoghue. He felt unnerved in the presence of the man. The man’s eyes were strange, they seemed to drill into him, cold, icy, scheming, cunning, they burned right through him and seemed to be burning into the wall behind Donoghue’s head. He was glad of Abernethy’s company, and of the company of two uniformed officers. ‘Your fingerprints were in Toni Durham’s blood.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you killed her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You’re not denying it?’

  Purdue shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why deny it if you’ve got my dabs?’

  ‘Why indeed?’ said Donoghue. ‘But it would be good to have a nice clean confession instead of hints and innuendoes. You realize that this makes three women that you have killed.’

  ‘Three that you know of…’

  ‘That we know of,’ Donoghue echoed with a note of despair. ‘The girl you did time for, Stephanie Craigellachie and Toni Durham.’

  ‘Not bad, aye?’ Purdue smiled.

  Donoghue thought that Sussock was correct, this is a State Hospital case if ever there was one. Single to Carstairs Junction, please.

  The door of the interview room opened. A sergeant of the Airport Police handed a note to one of the constables, who handed it to Donoghue. Donoghue read it and said, ‘So that’s why you went to Germany. We thought you were bringing pornography back.’

  ‘I export the stuff,’ said Purdue. ‘Took a couple of master tapes for duplication over there.’

  ‘You going to tell us what you brought back or are we going to tell you what we found in your suitcase?’

  Purdue stared intently at Donoghue.

  ‘Well, you can make it hard for yourself or easy. It’s up to you. As it is, you are looking at two life sentences plus at least fifteen years for the contents of your suitcase.’

  ‘So I make a bit of money. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Depends on how you do it. There’s enough heroin in your suitcase to keep half of Glasgow supplied for a year.’

  Purdue shrugged. ‘Prove that it’s mine. I think you’ve planted it.’

  ‘We can prove that it’s yours if we have to. I imagine it’s got your dabs all over it. Probably under your fingernails as well.’

  Purdue began to suck his fingers.

  ‘You can do that as much as you like, it won’t do you any good. It has to be dug out, but the fact that you saw fit to do that is significant.’

  ‘OK, so you’ve nailed me. Where does that get you?’

  ‘It gets me where I wanted to go as soon as I saw a knife sticking out of Stephanie Craigellachie’s neck two days ago.’

  ‘She shot her mouth off too much.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mutilate her like your other victims, especially Toni Durham?’

  ‘She stole horse off me, Toni Durham. But I would have carved the Craigellachie girl if I hadn’t been disturbed by the other women.’

  ‘Other women?’

  ‘The older dames that were going to roll the Craigellachie girl. See, she was standing at the entrance to the alley where she always stands and I was working up behind her. Then she starts backing into the alley, backing towards me, and as she does so she lobs her purse into the building site, but she keeps backing up. I mean, it couldn’t be better so I waited for her to come on, I waited in a kind of backyard of some building. She came on backwards, I grabbed her, got her once in the throat, not neat, but I could tell by the blood that it was good enough.’ The man suddenly seemed lost in thought and he smiled, he actually smiled at the memory.

  ‘Get on with it!’ Donoghue’s patience was wearing thin.

  ‘Aye, then I saw what she was backing away from, four women it was, older dames, one had a butcher’s knife. They saw me, saw what I’d done. One screamed, they all ran, I ran. Anyway I was pushed for time. I had to catch the 10.00 p.m. flight to Hamburg. I had business to do in Hamburg.’

  Donoghue shivered. The chilling matter-of-factness of it. ‘And Toni Durham: you practically tore her apart?’

  ‘Aye, I did a good job there, right enough. A proper job. I was able to keep her alive long enough as well. She was still kicking when most of her blood was outside her.’

  ‘So what did she do to annoy you, cough and not say she was sorry?’

  ‘She lifted some horse that didn’t belong to her, and she gave it away trying to blame Craigellachie, for one. For two, she brought that little bitch Craigellachie into the operation. Craigellachie had a fault, she couldn’t keep her mouth zipped. Dangerous. She was useful, Toni was, but she was expendable.’

  Malcolm Montgomerie left Collette’s flat. He walked slowly, feeling relaxed and very, very satisfied. He walked to P Division police station, signed in and went up to the CID corridor. The corridor was deserted and there were no messages left for him in his pigeonhole. Donoghue was out. King was away, ‘not back’, Abernethy was ‘out’. So he signed out also, ‘not back’, and went home thinking about a cool lager or two.

  In Langside, in a room and kitchen, in a pine double bed Elka Willems lay awake, just looking at the ceiling and not thinking about very much at all. Beside her Ray Sussock lay in an awkward folded posture, slumbering, occasionally snoring. She let him sleep, not annoyed by his snoring, knowing he’d have to be woken soon, coaxed into life and pushed out into the night, grumbling and complaining, in order to make the graveyard shift on time.

  Richard King let himself into the back door of his modest semi-detached house. His beautiful, beloved wife embraced him and pressed a mug of tea into his hands. Still in the kitchen, he picked up the wood he had bought the previous November in order to make shelves for her. He looked at the wood, felt the grain, looked along it to see that it was straight and true and then put it down again. He went into the living-room and helped Ian build a tower with his brightly-coloured plastic bricks.

  In a house in Bearsden a well-dressed couple sat silently gazing into each other’s eyes while a silver thing in the corner of the room went round and round and round.

  Donoghue returned to his home in Edinburgh and in that hour before dusk, having left a good neighbour with their children, he and his wife strolled out arm in arm.

  The thought struck him suddenly and forcibly that this was the first time that he and his lady had walked out in this manner.