by Caro Ramsay
Now, Sandra was concerned about the location of the money. She turned to look at the silly old cow, sitting, eyes closed, her head lolling to one side as her right hand played its invisible piano. Sandra thought those guys in Switzerland had it right. The planet was busy enough.
‘I haven’t been up here for years,’ said Costello, looking around her at the huge tenements to the left and the right, sandstone fortifications that lined Athole Lane. They could have held back marauding hordes from anywhere. ‘All this a couple of hundred yards from Byres Road, the hidden face of Glasgow.’
O’Hare replied, ‘That’s what I like about this city, turn a different corner and it changes character. I haven’t been up here since that cold snap at the end of February. They found a homeless person, hypothermic, right over there. Stiff as a board. At least five cars had driven round that body and nobody noticed. I can’t think what is worse, seeing a dying person and ignoring them or being so blasé and locked up in your own Volvo and Waitrose world that you don’t even notice. At least this tea chest here was spotted.’
‘Only because the dog was having a benny and I bet Mr Pickering thought there was something valuable in it. He saw that padded lining and thought hey ho, we are onto something here. Car boot sale or a reward. He might have thought it really did fall off the back of a lorry. I mean look at them all, over-privileged arseholes.’ Costello kicked a stone around with her toe, watching it rattle across the cobblestones of the lane, then winced at the pain in her face. ‘I suppose the homeless are not sexy, they are not vote catchers, and probably don’t vote themselves so why should Klingon Kirkton and his golf club pals care about them. But somebody has to.’ She looked round her, seeing the white extension that was so at odds with the lane and the old walls, the aged trees. The backs of the tenements were far apart, built in the days when the rear lane was access to the bin area and the huge back garden each tenement had. There would have been washing sheds, and toilets and all sorts down here. A few of the houses swallowed up the entire rear garden, extending back to the lane, which would afford a square footage to rival that of a football pitch. These houses may have been tenements but they were huge. Some of them had eight or nine bedrooms, with spiralling wooden staircases and stained glass windows that ran over two or three floors. Athole House, the secure living facility, was two such properties knocked through. In this part of Glasgow, there were still some that remained complete. A few streets further back they had been knocked into tiny flats with a jigsaw of a floor plan. Further back they spawned the student bedsit. The bigger flats around here were occupied by rich artists, architects, a few TV personalities and some literary writers. It was a clever piece of marketing to open the secure living facility and an even better bit of marketing not to call it an old folk’s home. Secure living facility sounded so much nicer, so less elderly. She looked at her watch and wondered if Pippa had managed to eat any lunch without spilling it down her.
She backed up a few steps to get a better look at the building extended back to the lane, the white single-storey extension; new and architect designed. It looked so odd among the Victorian tenement splendour, minimalism among much loved bric-a-brac. She was pretty sure that was on the site of the house that had burned down. It too had been an ugly architect’s conversion in the row of fine Victorian tenements and it had been somewhere round here, Marchmont Terrace if her memory served her right. There had been outrage it had ever got planning permission in the first place. If it had not been for the tragedy, where three people and a firefighter had lost their lives, there would have been a collective sigh of relief that the bloody eyesore had gone up in flames. Unfortunately it had been replaced by a building even uglier, if that was possible. Costello was sure she was looking at the back of it right now.
O’Hare stood up, his back making its usual crack. He swore quietly.
‘Why here? Why right at this bit? Where this eyesore is?’
‘It’s not easily visible from either end, I noticed that when I came through. It doglegs a little, so there was some aspect of the tea chest being concealed.’
‘By why next to this white outbuilding? To stop a vehicle getting through here?’
‘Costello, a double decker bus could get through there.’
They both looked up at the roofline, the gap of the new build.
Costello asked, ‘But this is the rebuild after the Marchmont Terrace fire?’
The pathologist walked a few steps backwards, lifting his hands to protect his eyes from the sun as he looked up. He pointed his finger, charting the roofline of the building. ‘Yes. It was brought down the first time by subsidence, and then the house that burned down was built. This is the third one on that site. Lucky white heather.’ He ran a bony hand through his unruly grey hair. ‘I did the post on the Marchmont Terrace firefighter; McGuigan. David? Derek? Drew? God, my memory is terrible these days.’
Costello turned round to look. ‘Roof fall?’
‘In the end, yes. They thought there was a child in the building. He was told not to go back in, he did. He got caught. The couple who owned the house were killed. There was another death …’ He paused to think.
‘The woman who jumped. She died later in the hospital. I know that much,’ Costello murmured, the wind in the lane chilling them a little. She was thinking if that had happened nowadays, everybody and his dog would have filmed that woman’s fall. Death was now in the public domain.
‘Deke Kilpatrick survived the fire, he was a wee bit famous back then, back in the nineties round here on the jazz circuit. He played a mean sax. I used to go and listen to him, sometimes.’
Costello looked at the pathologist, tall, getting a little stooped, his tie always done tight to the neck, his grey crinkly hair, and found it impossible to think of him in a nightclub, listening to jazz, describing anything as a ‘mean sax’.
O’Hare searched his brain for the name. ‘McEwan. That was the dead couple’s name, the boy’s name. Ally McGuigan was the firefighter who died. Knew it would come back to me eventually. It normally does, at three in the morning when I am trying to get to sleep.’
Costello nodded, the name made it real. A round-faced man with an Oliver Hardy moustache. She could see the headlines, he had died a hero. But he had died for nothing. The boy hadn’t been found. As she stood there, she could hear the sudden cracking and burning of flames, the crashing of wood caught by fire and breaking, burning, that acrid smell of burning. She opened her eyes. O’Hare was standing looking at her. The air was clear, it was a bright sunny day, the only noise was the distant drumming of the parade. The auditory hallucination of a memory disturbed, a memory that came too close. She shivered.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. I was thinking what a terrible way to die, like that. When we were up at the loch side, you know.’
‘You don’t need to …’
‘But when that fire was behind me and the deep, ice-cold water in front of me. It was an easy decision to walk forward. Anything to get away from those flames.’ Costello’s eyes closed and she shook her head. Two years on but that memory came back as quick and fresh as the summer breeze. ‘And the survivor?’ The words tumbled out her mouth. Costello was thinking about the home for the elderly she had just visited. She knew a burn victim when she saw one. Scarface. ‘Kilpatrick?’
‘Kilpatrick. Deke Kilpatrick. The cool sax, the very man,’ agreed O’Hare.
‘Well, he’s up there at Athole House, where Pippa is. I met him this morning.’
O’Hare looked at her in disbelief. ‘You’re kidding? Well …’ He thought for a bit. ‘Maybe not so odd. He would be a member of some musical union so it’s the obvious place for him to be.’ O’Hare looked at the floor of the InciTent, a narrow strip of worn concrete, dried mud and the odd weed poking through.
They both looked about in the quiet, chemical air of the tent. Both thinking the same thought.
‘Do you think it relates to the deposition site?’ mused Costello. ‘At the
back of that building, where his wife jumped to her death, and he lives over there. He can look out the window and see this corner any time he wants. But he’s not fit to do anything, not this. Is there a message here? It’s very odd.’
‘Yeah, that’s a little odd, Costello. But since when was killing somebody and folding them up into a box perfectly normal?’
A strong gust of wind down the lane carried a slight chill. The sides of the InciTent flapped as if the body was reminding them of its presence and their business. The boy in the tea chest was waiting.
By three p.m., Irene Kerr was pacing the floor, her navy blue trousers now creased like crepe paper, her woollen cardigan stained with tears and coffee. Maggie had placed her own blue cardigan, bobbled and worn, round her shoulders. The neat cut of Irene’s blonde hair, the careful polished colour in her toes exposed by her leather sandals, testified to somebody who normally took greater care over their appearance but now Irene’s eyes were red and swollen from crying and her white top under her cardigan was stained with the reddish brown of Costello’s drying blood.
Anderson introduced himself again, clearly. She had not been in a fit state to take anything on board when they had met the first time.
She shook his hand warmly, a dry, firm handshake. ‘I knew there was something wrong; I could feel it in my bones.’
Anderson smiled, pulling out an easy chair so they were more side by side rather than a confrontational head to head. They were in exactly the same room, exactly the same chairs, as when he had interviewed Amy that morning, although it felt a very long time ago. She had been admitted to hospital. Her mother was with her. A doctor had phoned Wyngate to say that he thought the student had been drugged and that they had taken blood samples, as they had no real idea what with. And that she had nearly dislocated her knee, but they didn’t think from a fall as there was no abrasion or laceration of the skin. More like she had been hit with something. It could still be accidental. Then he had added the anaesthetic effect of whatever she had taken was wearing off. She was in a lot of pain.
Wyngate had to ask about the strange black lines Amy had on her body. The same lines Anderson thought he saw on the ankles of the boy in the tea chest. Black lines drawn round a joint? The doctor was a little off-hand; ‘Oh, we had thought they were tattoos but they washed off OK. She had them on both knees.’
‘And you didn’t think that was strange?’ Wyngate had asked the doctor.
‘It’s parade day. You have no idea what comes through A and E on parade day. We have a Munchkin here who choked on a fox’s tail.’ With that he hung up, not in bad grace, just very busy.
But those black lines on both knees and on the ankle of the dead boy. It made Wyngate feel more than a little uneasy.
Anderson waved a hand, indicating that Irene should sit.
‘Do you know how long it will be? I mean, I know you have to do all these tests and things but if I could see him – have a look at him then I would know. And until I know, I really don’t know what else to do.’ She looked at Anderson, deep into his eyes. ‘Please.’
‘I am so sorry. As soon as I can, I will let you see him, of course, but at this stage I am not in charge. It’s the pathologist’s call and he knows you are here waiting. As soon as he can involve you, he will.’ He moved slightly in his chair, leaning forwards. He needed her to concentrate, and he couldn’t say that the boy’s face was hidden, tipped down between his own knees.
‘Irene, do you know anywhere that David might have been? I know he is your son but a lot of sons do things that they don’t want their mother to know anything about. He is an adult.’ He was careful to use the present tense.
Irene clasped her hands and looked at the ceiling, tears still pouring down her face, leaving wet runs on her cheeks. ‘You have no idea how much I want him to be somewhere right now; somewhere that I would totally disapprove of. Anywhere except lying in a morgue, anywhere but that. But no, that would not be like him. I know him.’
‘Do you think he might have gone somewhere and not noticed, not realized that time has passed, switched his phone off? He might not be aware that we are looking for him? There’s a lot of street entertainment on, something might have caught his eye?’
‘He would have let his friends know. You have asked at the hospital?’ She pointed, half-heartedly, over her shoulder towards the Western by force of habit. It had been closed for a year now.
‘Yes, we have.’
‘So what happened to him?’
Anderson had the permutations of a thousand scenarios tumbling through his mind, only a few of them had a happy ending. If the body was David then this healthy young man was killed and dumped within a sixty-minute time frame, in broad daylight, in front of a lot of people on a busy street corner on the busiest day of the year. That suggested that something very planned, very deliberate and probably very awful had happened to him. ‘There is one question that I do have to ask?’
‘Ask away.’
‘Is everything OK at home?’
She blinked once. ‘Fine.’
But Anderson had noticed. Hesitation. ‘Totally fine?’ he asked, giving her that small smile that bred confidence, the expression that worked on everybody as long as they were innocent.
‘My husband works in Dubai. I have ulcerative colitis. I am not sure that those two facts are entirely unrelated. My illness is one of the reasons David phones me so much. And I had a bad attack a few weeks ago, small hours of the morning. David phoned his father. A woman answered.’ She couldn’t keep the disdain from her voice. ‘She was in my husband’s house at an unsuitable hour and …’ She stopped. ‘Maybe his dad isn’t the man that he thought his dad was. I think he has learned that lesson.’
‘And there is no way David could have done something on impulse, like flown out to have it out with his dad?’
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘I have his passport.’
Another thing. Too close.
‘Does he spend a lot of time online?’
‘What boy doesn’t? But he’s chatting to his friends. He’s not the type to be groomed or anything. He’s not a child.’
‘We need to check his computer.’
‘Please do. I want him found.’
‘Irene, your son was last seen sitting outside a café, as if he was waiting for somebody. It does happen that trusting young men can be exactly that, too trusting. Did you see any change in him over the last few weeks?’
‘No. Maybe a bit off with his dad. But not me. I suspect that you don’t believe me, but I would know if there was something going on. I am his mother.’
‘Well, one of my colleagues is talking to his friends, getting a picture of what they were doing.’
‘Mr Anderson, he is studying pure mathematics at university. He is going into his second year. He was top of his class.’ Her mouth pursed in determination. ‘He doesn’t drink. He does not have friends that I don’t know about.’
Maggie raised her eyebrows.
Irene smiled, sniffing back tears. ‘I know you think that I am an overprotective mother who won’t let her boy grow up, but David is a nice lad. Winston is a nice lad. He has missed a lot this year so David was trying to make sure that he was keeping up. He looks out for people, does David. He has been friends with Innes since primary one. He has never been late for anything. So you see what I mean when I say that I know that something awful has happened to him. I am his mother.’ She was on her feet, angry and shouting. Then she placed her crooked finger at her lips, took a deep breath, trying to stop the tears.
Anderson nodded and wondered how many times he had heard those words from a parent, only for them to find out that they did not know their child at all. A bit unworldly? He’d go out of his way to help anybody. He was ripe to be the victim of a groomer, if a bit old. Anderson’s phone bleeped. He read the text message. Irene Kerr studied his face.
‘What’s happened?’ She put her hand out on his knee, clamping her fingers in hard.
‘I’ll
get Caroline, our liaison officer, to make you a cup of tea. There’s something come in that I must attend to.’ And Anderson left the room, leaving the two women watching the door close behind him.
By three thirty p.m. the Duchess was back in her usual place, at the window of Tosca with a lilac quilt over her bony knees, looking out over the gardens that were resplendent in the summer sunshine. The meticulously cut grass was so green it looked as though it had been dyed by a student of Chagall.
Her patent, black, kitten-heeled shoes sat neatly on the footplates of the wheelchair. The olive green pashmina was wound round her shoulders and pinned with a single diamond and the duck-egg blue dress draped neatly round the front of the wheelchair. Her gaze rested on a spot somewhere over the skyline of the city, her crimson lips pursed tight with concentration as her mind tried to make sense of it all. Her imagination was playing out another scene that she knew well but could not immediately recognize. Her right hand knew what it was doing, held out horizontally, fingers twisting slightly. Her head rested to one side listening to a melody only she could hear.
‘Pietro?’ she whispered. ‘Pietrino mio, sei tu?’ Her hand fell, a self-conscious wipe of her palm on the blanket. Thin, arthritic fingers clasped the arms of the chair and she pulled herself into a more upright position, smartening her posture. ‘Pietro?’ She asked again, little more than a whisper, barely audible, thinking that he was right behind her.