by Caro Ramsay
‘But the clothes? You can tell by his clothes?’ Irene watched as the two cops deliberately did not look at each other. She sniffed loudly and pointed. ‘You know, don’t you. Oh my God, I don’t believe this is happening to me.’ Irene sank her head into her hands, her shoulders heaving. Her sobbing was painful to witness.
Costello met Maggie’s eyes; the question was there. Costello gave a slight shrug; they had nothing to argue with.
Maggie went a shade paler and bit her lip, a tear gathering in her eye, but she wiped it away and embraced her friend’s head a little closer.
Anderson sat back down at the table. ‘There is no easy way out of this but to wait. I’m sorry but as my colleague said, if David has come to harm then we can’t risk losing valuable evidence.’
‘Oh my God.’ Irene leaned forward, a long slow scream escaped from her soul somewhere, the cry that life would never be the same again. Anderson reached out and held her hand. Her friend cradled her head and let her cry, it was the best they could do.
And Anderson knew exactly how they felt.
At twelve twenty Mulholland was in the office watching the Twitter feed come in from the parade route, and monitoring it. He had been really bored until somebody uploaded to YouTube a video of two blonde women having a fight; one in a familiar dark suit getting an elbow in the face. Mulholland played the short clip over and over. He was enjoying it frame by frame when his phone rang. He was not really interested in Costello’s update that the DCI was trying to get back from the locus, no mere feat in the throes of the parade, but the appearance of a concerned individual, maybe the deceased’s mother, meant that the DCI really needed to stay at the scene.
‘His mother?’
‘Sorry, I’ll explain. That’s the creature that gives birth to humans, a bit like a dad but more intelligent. But Colin’s instructions are perfectly clear, treat David Kerr as a missing person for now.’
He heard her sniff on the end of the phone. ‘Is that the ID of the deceased,’ he began typing, ‘David Kerr?’
‘If he was I would have used the word victim, wouldn’t I? He is not the deceased, we have a body and we have a missing person. Two different things. For now you are treating David Kerr as a missing person. There is no identification on the dead body.’
‘He’s only been missing for what an hour? On the biggest drinking day on the West End? The boy will be pissed somewhere. What is Colin thinking?’
‘David Kerr does not drink. He doesn’t seem to do anything except study. He’s a very low-risk victim. But the body type, age and clothes all match.’
‘Well, there you go then, it’s him. What’s the palaver?’ muttered Mulholland, bored at the mind-numbing Twitter feed scrolling in front of him, stuck in the office when the weather was so sunny outside and the dull pain in his leg, throbbing away to remind him why. Even attending a murder scene would be preferable to this.
Costello’s voice was as soft as diamond. ‘I am telling you, for now and the foreseeable future, the body is unidentified and you are treating David Kerr as a missing person. If this all goes tits up and he is the victim, we will be ahead of the game in tracing his last movements. We don’t want to miss out on valuable intelligence with regards to his “last seen” and we have already gone a fair way to narrowing that down.’
‘So it was the mum who nearly beat you to the crime scene. Is that true?’
There was a slight delay while Costello weighed up gossip against authority. ‘Indeed, bloody traffic. It put us all in a delicate situation. Look, can you trace his dad, Duncan Kerr? I think he might be away in Dubai but I don’t know if that is hardworking father away or shagging the mistress in Dubai type of away. The mother is not for leaving the scene, but Colin is keen to get her away.’
‘Why are you talking like that?’ mocked Mulholland. ‘You got a cold?’
‘Hay fever.’
‘Nothing to do with being elbowed in the face then?’
A pause. ‘Injured in the line of duty.’
‘I’m so sorry. I saw it on YouTube and I thought it was awful that your humiliation was filmed for the amusement of the general public. Bloody funny though. I’ve shared it on my Facebook page.’
‘Well, thank you for that. If you weren’t a complete girlie with brittle bones, you would be out here with us. So you get on the little bit of your job you can still do: the typing.’
‘You can’t say that, I am a disabled person.’
‘And I’m haemorrhaging blood, so piss off.’
And she cut the call.
Costello left Anderson with the two women and a strong brew of tea, then walked back into the warmth of the sun. The crowd at the end of the lane was steadily growing, a few more casual passers-by on the way to the parade had stopped, thinking that this real life CSI might be more entertaining. And the usual pack of journalists, cameras out, interviewing people in the crowd with tape recorders had arrived. She was thankful that a tent had now been erected over the tea chest. The sensitive part of the job could now get underway. Costello pulled on a protective suit and negotiated her way through the crime scene team to get to the body, ignoring the shouts of the journalists from behind her.
‘How do they know stuff before we do?’ she asked vaguely, once in the safety of the InciTent.
‘The collective consciousness of Facebook, Twitter and every other thing that will cause the next generation of humanity to have extra-long thumbs, no fingers and only three functioning brain cells. You have no idea how many deaths mobile phones cause. Still, I suppose if you watch a screen rather than where you are putting your feet, then eventually you will fall down a manhole or off a cliff and that is Darwinism in a nutshell.’ The old pathologist flashed her a crinkly smile. ‘You should see a doctor about that.’ He pointed a gloved finger to her face.
‘Irene has sharp elbows.’ She nodded at the body; all she could see was gently curled, honey brown hair. ‘Is this her son?’ She handed O’Hare her mobile with a picture of David Kerr, a very recent picture, Irene’s background picture. David had a broad smile, a sensuous thickness round his lips, his hair was light brown in the picture but spiked with wax, tiny needles covering his scalp. It was a casual photograph, not posed or prepared. She could draw the conclusion that David liked to wax his hair. The boy in the box had not waxed his hair on the day he died.
‘There is no ID on the body. We’ve been through his pockets, well his obvious pockets. No wallet, nothing.’
‘Mugged?’
The pathologist shrugged. ‘Maybe.’ He shook his head. ‘He looks untouched, asleep. Only the merest smell of vomit round his face.’
‘He would have been stone cold sober.’
‘And now he is stone cold.’ O’Hare looked at her, then back at the body. ‘Stone cold with no rigor at all. That’s odd.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s an anomaly but I refuse to second guess.’
‘Oh I know. Put two pathologists in a room and get three different opinions.’
O’Hare ignored the old joke. ‘Has he had any fits? Epilepsy? Drug abuse?’
‘Not that the mum said. I think she would say if she knew. Nice boy from all accounts.’ Then Costello added at the sight of O’Hare’s disbelieving eyebrow and retold the verified story of the sick friend. ‘He’s not the type to think “Oh I have a spare five minutes so I’ll knock back a quarter bottle of Thunderbird”.’ Costello sniffed, and winced, holding a fresh paper tissue to her nose then pulling it away to examine the crimson rosette pattern. ‘How much blood can I lose before I die?’
‘The same as everybody else, Costello.’
By the time Anderson brought Irene Kerr back to Partickhill Police Station, Mulholland had managed to get a whole page of typing on David Andrew Kerr. The boy had not been admitted to any hospital in the Glasgow area. David was a nice looking boy, orthodontically straight teeth, fair hair usually waxed into spikes, a good student, and a good friend. He was bright; he walked a very specific path in life. The safe path. And that did
not make him an easy target.
He looked at the E-bulletin about Paige Riley. She was there, on the missing persons list. She had enjoyed none of the advantages that David Kerr had enjoyed in her short, and probably now ended, life. It was sad to say but that was a surprise to nobody. She ticked every box; the perfect target. Homeless, street living, addiction; born to fail, some would say. The only person who noticed she was missing was a commuter who walked past her begging every day and had got concerned. Nobody else. This boy, David Kerr, was a different animal altogether. That’s not to say he hadn’t been complicit in some way, he might have found his life too stuffy and too controlled, looked for a little secret release from being the perfect child. Mulholland could relate to that. Being perfect was a lot of pressure. David might have bought drugs, got into somebody’s car and got a whack over the back of the head before being driven round the block. He might have been flashing his money about. His posh boy accent might have been noticed by some of the incomers into the West End, hiding in the crowds for the parade. He might have been ripe for the organized gangs of pickpockets. Mulholland thought what a field day James Kirkton would have with this. More fodder for his hobby horse of illegal immigrants, the Romas, the gypsies. They would all be blamed. These people flooding into our country. God, he would go to town on this.
Mulholland scanned through the missing persons. Plenty of young men, too many of them. None yet matched the very precise timeline they had with David, they couldn’t argue with that. If he was the victim, this had been meticulously planned.
Mulholland scanned over his notes about David Kerr. The complicity didn’t fit well with his knowledge of psychology; David Kerr fitted more the ‘Bundy MO’. The killer would appeal to their victim’s good nature. Maybe struggling with something – a baby, a pram, a bit of furniture. A tea chest? That fitted better. ‘You couldn’t give me a hand with this, son, could you?’ A broken arm, or a wrist support and a tea chest sitting at the back of a 4x4 with the tailgate open. ‘The kids need it for the parade.’ And then the blow on the head, the ‘disabling insult’ as pathologists liked to put it. The body pushed into the back of the vehicle. But according to early reports, there was no injury to the head of the body on the tea chest, nothing obvious at least.
He put David’s appeal out to every police officer on the parade route. Even as he looked, Mulholland’s screen bleeped. The picture of Paige Riley reappeared. It was also going out to all officers, a special appeal today for those round and about the parade. The public being requested to keep their eyes out for her. They knew the photo was years out of date now, but it was the only one they had. She was typical of every teenager; long brown hair àla Kate Middleton, eyebrows like two black caterpillars lying dead across her forehead. She’d turn up dead in a ditch. Mulholland was thirty-seven now. How many of those had he seen in his professional life? Way, way too many. He decided to have a coffee and a painkiller.
Mulholland was on his second cup when his phone went. Frank Wyse, a young cop, had been chatting up the waitress in the Zeitgeist Café on the corner of Byres Road and Vinicombe Street when David’s picture came through and showed it to the staff. The girl behind the counter called over her colleague and the result of the conversation was that the boy in the picture had been sitting at one of the outside tables before the parade. He had been there about nine, one of their first customers. Described him as a good-looking, polite young man, which fitted what they knew of him. And he was on his own. He had ordered an Appletiser and one of their granola bars. He had told her to keep the change, and there had been some commotion outside but she didn’t know what exactly. They had been busy.
Mulholland jumped on the information, perfect time, perfect place. Because of the parade in the city all the CCTV was active. He phoned Anderson to tell him he was ordering the footage as he had a definite sighting. The boss had been curt in acknowledgement, no doubt the boy’s mother was a few feet away and he was trying to prevent her from finding out that they were on the track of what was probably the last piece of footage of her son alive.
Anderson asked the precise location of the camera. It was positioned high on the second floor of the hotel on the opposite corner of Byres Road, and looked across the street. It should show, at least on the south sweep, the corner where David had drank his Appletiser, and a little of the side street, Vinicombe Street. If something had happened to him then it would have been in that hour and up Vinicombe Street. He must have been enticed up there. The lanes off Vinicombe Street ran parallel to Byres Road on the east side. The tea chest and the body had been found on the west side. And Byres Road, in-between, would have been busy, even at that time. Somebody would have seen something. Hundreds of people had been milling about and Mulholland found it hard to believe that nobody had witnessed any foul play.
So there might be another explanation for his absence, maybe one with no foul play. Maybe the boy did have another life, something that his mother and friends knew nothing about. A girl he was meeting? Or a boy? That might be more like it if he wanted to keep it a bit quiet. It struck Mulholland that the boy might have deliberately arranged to see his friend with the Crohn’s early and so he could be ‘at a loose end’ for an hour before meeting his friends at eleven. He could have stayed with his friend but he didn’t. He walked down to Byres Road and waited, sitting at an outside table on one of the busiest corners in the whole street, waiting for somebody. Or something.
He gave a quick call to Winston. The student was panicky on the phone, had they found David yet?
‘No, not yet but don’t worry.’
‘But it’s going round Twitter that you’ve found a body.’
‘We find bodies in Glasgow every day of the week,’ said Mulholland in a voice fused with humour. ‘I’m sure it will be fine. What I want to know is, did he seem in a hurry to go?’
‘David? No, not really. I asked him to go. I was tired and wanted a lie in.’
‘OK, so he didn’t mention he was going anywhere?’
‘Yes, to meet Innes and the gang at the University Café. I’ve already told you that. He was taunting me with his breakfast ideas: fried egg, potato scone. All that stuff I can’t eat. He said he would treat me when I was better, to cheer me up, you know. But he never made it, did he?’ The boy’s voice choked a little.
Mulholland promised to phone back as soon as they had any news, then put down the phone and looked at David’s picture with his wide honest smile and spikey hair. ‘So where the hell did you get to?’
Sandra hummed along to the opera as she worked, the one she had been listening to in the car. She knew this bit. The Duchess didn’t seem to mind her joining in. Although previously, Sandra had caught the Duchess glaring at her, and she had realized that she was making up words that sounded like the Italian. The libretto, the libretti – something like that. Paolo had told her where to find the right words, but in that glare from the Duchess had been a smirk of humour and Sandra found herself warming to her charge.
There was beauty up here, in Tosca. It was a pleasure to work with so many beautiful things, doilies and fine china, when the world outside was so ugly. And Sandra knew that her great weakness was beautiful things, usually somebody else’s.
With some shame, she recalled the first time she had ever been alone in the room. She had tried the jewel boxes. All locked. So she then started looking through the Duchess’s photographs; her memory box. It might be of no intrinsic financial value but Sandra believed knowledge was power. Secrets were currency.
Instead Sandra had studied the old photographs and romanticized about the old lady. Filling in a backstory; imagining her walking round the back streets of Naples, performing, reciting, and being a somebody in her neighbourhood. Hanging around the Piazza del Plebiscito, drinking red wine and being chatted up by gorgeous men. Sandra had never been to Italy, she had barely made it out of Springburn, but she imagined the Duchess transported back into the sepia world of her memory book. In the room was a whole pile o
f music scores and other tattered books that had drawings of stage designs, forests, sunflowers, toadstools plus lighting rigs and all sorts. Standing on its end next to the books was a wooden and leather case, and in that was a huge tome. The title of the story was The Enchantress. It was a story the Duchess never got tired of hearing, indeed the old woman had caught Sandra looking at the pictures, hand drawn pictures and had gestured sharply. At first Sandra thought she was to put the book back, but no, the Duchess wanted to see it. She always wanted to look at it. It was heavy so Sandra held it as the Duchess ran her fingers over the beautiful illustrations, gold leafed and colours so vibrant, they almost hurt the eyes.
Sandra had tried to get the Duchess to speak about it, but no. In reality, the old lady had not really spoken for fifteen or sixteen years. She muttered in Italian every now and again, the odd word in English. It was rumoured by the B shift care team that she had been struck dumb by some terrible incident that was referred to but never actually clarified. And it wasn’t the sort of thing that she could ask Paolo; well, not yet anyway. She was working on that. She would wait until the Duchess had eaten Cranachan, the cream always made her feel a little poorly. So Sandra had a plan to wait until it was on the menu again and she’d make sure the Duchess got a good portion. Then later when she was quiet and a little hangy, Sandra would ask Paolo while his mother, sorry ‘the Duchess’, was feeling so bad, why she looked so sad at times. And she’d let the question linger a little.
Keen to improve her loveliness quota, she had sought Paolo’s permission to sit with the Duchess and go through her memory book with her, flicking through the pages pointing out snapshots of her and her husband. Sandra had read that this kind of stimulation could be good for the mind of the elderly, revisiting moments in their life. Paolo had thought it a good idea. The Duchess would look at the photographs, occasionally pushing the book away as if the sight of something made her angry. When she looked at the illustrations in The Enchantress, the tears would start rolling down the Duchess’s face, a thick bony finger with a ridged bright red talon moving along under the scrolled lettering which might have been Italian or Latin, could have even been Serbo Croat for all Sandra knew. Handwritten alongside on some pages were little numbers in a Greek script, in a little column of four digits ready to be totalled. But she thought, suspected, that the gold leaf might be real, and that the book was worth plenty but too individual to be sold at auction, too recognizable.