Standing Still

by Caro Ramsay

  ‘Can we take a look at that girl?’ he heard himself say, his voice sounded odd, too calm, too controlled. ‘I think she goes to the same school that Claire does. Did,’ he corrected himself.

  ‘Does that posh school produce a better class of hooligan?’ asked Costello. ‘If Claire knows her then why don’t we ask Claire.’

  ‘I like to keep my private life and my work separate.’

  ‘And is this some new kind of arrangement?’

  ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘Because,’ snapped Anderson. ‘Sorry Costello, it’s just that there had been some issues at the school.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say so? Can we get a close-up on that lassie?’ Costello asked. ‘It’s not nine o’clock yet, those girls look like they have been out all night.’

  ‘It’s not easy for her, being my daughter. Look at that body language.’

  ‘It’s that skinny one with the streaks who is the ring leader. What does she do with her foot? That looks like Vik doing the twist at the Christmas party.’

  Graham rewound the footage and scrolled the picture in tighter. There was something under the skinny girl’s foot, scrunched up on the pavement. It looked like a little bird. ‘She has stepped on the flower that Claire had caught.’

  ‘What a lovely girl she is. If you want them leaned on let me know.’ Costello’s voice had that steely quality, something had hurt. And it was hurting still. ‘Has Claire mentioned this situation?’

  ‘She did. Said it was such unsophisticated bullying. That was the word Claire used, “unsophisticated”. She was criticizing her bullies. She trivialized it.’

  ‘Still hurts though, I wonder what was said to her.’

  ‘A lip reader would be able to tell you,’ suggested Walker, leaning closer to the screen.

  ‘Or you could ask her,’ suggested Costello again.

  Walker pointed. ‘Well, I can tell you who the dark-haired one is, the one with the streaky hair. That young lady is Tania Kirkton. James Kirkton’s daughter.’

  Paolo Girasole was as nondescript as anybody could be, anything from early thirties to late forties. Brown hair that was only brown, no red undertones, no copper highlights. It was brown. He was lightly tanned, wearing jeans and a faded denim shirt with his sleeves rolled up. Everything was neatly ironed but had seen better days. His shoes were old but well-polished leather, the watch a treasured classic and his leather satchel shiny and curled with age. And he looked worried, the worn-down weary fatigue of middle management, Wyngate guessed. He was worn out by the system and clinging on to a boring desk job by his fingertips, trying to smile as the bright young things were promoted over him. His job would be drifting sideways into mediocrity. He glanced at his watch and then the clock on the wall.

  ‘Do you have to be somewhere?’ asked Mulholland.

  ‘No, I was visiting Athole House, and I needed to be back there before too long. I only nipped out to hand this in. Wasn’t expecting to be detained.’ But his manner didn’t show any annoyance, he was stating fact.

  They asked his name and address. Paolo Girasole lived in Manchester Avenue and he worked for the council in refuse collection, in the office not in the bins. He was born in 1980 on the 4th July.

  ‘Girasole? That’s a bit of a famous name in these parts? Fish and chips shop?’ said Wyngate, who had grown up not three streets from the station.

  ‘No alas, I wish. Then I might not be skint.’ He smiled. An easy smile.

  ‘Oh, so where did you find the phone?’

  ‘At the bins at Athole Square, on the main road. So I picked it up and it didn’t look that damaged.’ He pointed out the little dent on the corner. ‘I turned it on to see if I could find a number, but it’s locked, so I stuck it in my pocket and went to visit the care home as planned, then thought I’d better hand it in. You know, when I heard about the incident at the bottom of the road. The boy?’

  ‘Very public spirited of you.’

  ‘It’s a brand new Samsung Galaxy 7 edge. It’s worth a few bob. So somebody must have dropped it.’

  ‘Can you confirm where you found it?’ They handed him a map and he put an X on the spot, an italic X in dark blue ink.

  Wyngate filled out the paperwork, asking Graham to take Paolo’s fingerprints for exclusion purposes while Mulholland listened to the voicemails on the phone, now confirmed as being David’s, his mother knew the code to unlock it. All it contained were increasingly worried voicemails from David’s mother, from the friends he was due to meet, and from Winston who he had just left. His calendar had gym, study periods for each subject and a few visits to the cinema planned. Nobody else had either texted, Facebooked or emailed him. Nobody that they hadn’t already spoken to.

  All that happened was that somebody had dropped David’s phone. It was another lead taking them nowhere.

  As Costello, Walker and Graham scrutinized the film at the moment David appeared at the Zeitgeist Café, Anderson’s mind kept drifting. This was looking more like a murder enquiry and his daughter was right in the middle of it. Yet he kept thinking about the bullying, and the ‘whatever’. He was looking for whatever it was that labelled David a victim. Maybe it was his location, sitting alone on the end of the row right on a corner. A corner that was only a few minutes’ walk down Byres Road from Papyrus where the three girls had confronted Claire. As they watched, Graham’s hands on the control, both Costello and Anderson said ‘stop’ at once. It was David, walking into shot, then stopping and bending down to pick something up. He held it out to Claire, a smile. Maybe their hands touched.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Costello. ‘Chivalry indeed.’

  ‘She did say she had bumped into him before, now we know. He picked up the squashed paper rose and gave it to her.’

  They watched David slowly walk down Byres Road, to the camera that covered the Vinicombe Street/Byres Road junction. Once he sat down, he looked at his phone, then he leaned back in the seat, his can of Appletiser on the table beside him. He closed his eyes, slightly turned to his left to face the sun. He looked relaxed and happy, he was not expecting whatever befell him.

  They all jumped when the phone rang. It was the desk downstairs. Claire had arrived. The car had driven a huge detour to get through the crowd.

  Anderson put the phone down. ‘Just to make it quite clear, there’s no way that I am not sitting in on this interview.’ For a moment he stared at Costello, who shrugged and said it was no skin off her nose.

  ‘I don’t get paid enough to babysit a DCI flaunting the rules. Again. But Archie here does.’ She smiled sweetly at the fiscal.

  They had put her in the family room, where they had sat with Irene Kerr an hour earlier, their dirty coffee cups were still on the small table.

  Claire was sitting a little nervous, a little in awe of her father. ‘So, like, this is where you work?’

  ‘Yes. Where did you think I worked?’

  ‘And are you in charge of all these people?’ She waved her finger at Costello and Walker. People she knew, but it had never dawned on her that there was such a strict hierarchy in the force and that her dad was at the top of it. ‘And those blokes downstairs?’

  ‘No, not really,’ said Anderson, aware of Walker’s bristle.

  ‘If he was in charge there’d be a danger of us doing as we were told,’ said Costello, making Claire laugh.

  Claire began playing with the bracelets on her wrist as she looked around the blue-painted room, for a moment her teenage cool giving way to the child that was still in there somewhere. She was trying to conceal her excitement about the situation.

  ‘So Claire, you were photographing the parade preparations this morning?’

  ‘You know I was.’

  ‘And something happened, we caught it on CCTV. The young man …’

  ‘Yeah, the guy who had the fit, like I told you.’ She shrugged as if to say, So what?

  ‘OK, can you describe for us what happened?’

&n
bsp; ‘It was like I said.’

  ‘Again,’ said Anderson, so Costello didn’t have to. ‘My DI here has not heard any of it and she needs to record what you saw.’

  Claire looked at Costello. ‘I was watching the set-up for the parade, I wanted to do whole montage of the day … I was a bit thirsty …’

  ‘Where were you at this point?’

  ‘Up at Papyrus, they have a recessed doorway.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘I was there from half eight.’

  They knew the exact time from the CCTV.

  ‘OK, so you were there for a wee while then …’

  ‘Well, the Zeitgeist Café was the nearest place open that early so I went there for a Diet Coke. I took it outside and I heard something behind me, like a clatter.’ She gestured over her left shoulder. ‘And I turned and he was there, coughing like he was gagging. He was holding his neck and I went over and helped him up. Then his mum came and took him away, that was all it was.’

  They all knew that the woman was not his mother. David had not put his hand on his throat. It was not on the CCTV. Claire’s brain was making sense of what she had seen. But he continued with the questioning, somewhere in her memory there would be nuggets of the truth.

  ‘His mum?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said with a shrug, ‘I presumed so, and she was kinda old. She knew him.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  Claire shook her head.

  ‘Did he seem to recognize her?’

  ‘No, he was … well …’ Her eyes dropped. ‘He was finding it difficult to breathe, but she knew what to do, so I thought she was his mum. Maybe a nurse, she knew her stuff. Competent.’

  ‘So he didn’t say anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you think she knew him?’

  ‘Because she … knew him. She lifted him up a wee bit, you know, to help him away.’

  ‘Away where?’

  ‘Into a car, I think.’

  ‘What car? Did you see it?’

  Claire shrugged. ‘No, she said that her car was parked round the corner. I don’t know what make of car. I never saw it.’

  ‘She called him by his name?’

  ‘Yes … No … I don’t know, I think she called him pet or something.’

  ‘Would you recognize her again?’

  ‘I don’t know. Her face was turned away from mine most of the time. She had sunglasses on, blonde hair, well dressed.’ Her hands mimicked a bob cut. ‘Classy.’

  Anderson nodded. That was something.

  ‘Accent?’

  ‘Scottish. Normal, not like posh or Edinburgh or anything. But not a ned. Nothing like that.’

  ‘Smell?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘What do they smell of? Perfume? Drink? Smoke? Anything?’

  ‘She had nice perfume on. Not a smoker. Very clean.’

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘Clean hands.’

  ‘Could you draw an impression of her for us?’

  She snorted. ‘Draw her? I can do better than that.’ She pulled her camera towards her, looking closely at it. ‘I’ll have a picture of her.’

  The Nikon D750 had taken a perfectly clear image that was blown up by Wyngate. Technically it was a good photograph, but as the subject had kept her head turned, the slightly side view didn’t show them any more than they already knew. What they had was a partial outline of the left side of her face, a few hairs blowing across her cheek. She looked very alive, something about the set of her jaw, she looked determined, on a mission.

  They rewound the film with Claire’s commentary. The boy in the Hollister top had stopped to pick up the paper rose from the ground – well, what was left of the rose. It proved that David Kerr had been walking down Byres Road, north to south, en route to the University Café. He never got there. Why? It was early on Parade Day, Byres Road was already extremely busy. The one thing that did stand testament was that David Kerr seemed a very polite young man, he was gracious when people walked into him. He had been there when Claire got upset and had let himself be known to her, the rose was a ruse. He was saying, ‘I saw that’ and it had given her some comfort, restored her faith in humanity a little.

  Wyngate was busy finding the section where David was, sitting outside the Zeitgeist Café about ten minutes later. That timing would be about right, slow walking against the direction of the pedestrians walking up to the Botanics. The film moved on, the time ticked slowly by. The blonde woman asking for directions, then a few minutes later David slumped forward, Claire stepped into the picture. The chair was pulled to one side. The other chair was kicked out the way. David was on the ground, his back against the wall, eyes opening and closing, feeling the ground with his fingers as though he was dizzy. Fear etched deep into his face. Then the blonde woman reappeared on the scene, bent over him and brushed his hair back from his face. The film went on as before. The woman lifted him from the ground, then hesitated, dropped her head for a moment, then with the skill of a nurse, or a carer, walked him round the corner, him unsteady on his feet, her as solid as a rock, to Vinicombe Street and out of the sight of the CCTV camera. She wasn’t carrying or pulling anything with her, as she had been when she had asked for directions. Had she delivered it somewhere?

  The camera on Byres Road looked right up the street, it wasn’t well placed for them to see anything once they turned the corner.

  ‘Go back a bit, what does she do there?’ asked Costello.

  Wyngate reversed the tape, they watched in silence as the blonde dipped her head.

  ‘What is she doing?’ Costello mimicked her movement.

  ‘She’s looking at her watch. What could be time critical? Somebody waiting with transport round the corner?’

  They all viewed the tape. ‘When she checked her watch, she is carrying most of the weight of David. So why does she look at her watch exactly then? Why?’

  Anderson said, ‘OK, I know we have watched it twenty times but go back to the scene on the corner. Wind it back to where David first appears on the street. Is that the only time that woman gets close to him? Where did she go, what happened to the thing she was pulling? Where did she go with that, where did she go with him? Claire said that she had car keys with her. How many hands did she have? How did she manage that?’

  ‘She takes him up to the corner, then up Vinicombe Street. She’s a relatively tall but slim woman. He is a slim built man. Costello how far could you carry Mulholland here?’

  Costello looked Mulholland up and down, considering. ‘As far as the nearest cliff, drop him over.’ She looked at his bad leg. ‘She must have had transport, maybe it was waiting for her. We could put a call out for any photos, any videos filmed around there. The parade was on later but there’ll be hundreds of versions of that, all those mums and dads, and aunts and uncles. We might be able to get a good image of her. Claire got a good look at him, but not at her, not with those bloody glasses. I bet she never took them off. She has them on for a reason, she is careful not to show her face.’

  ‘I don’t think the finance office would accept the expense to trawl through all that lot, for so little evidential value. Do you want to argue with them? We have a budget to stick to.’

  ‘So we need to work with the film that we have, for now at least. Anything else will take too long.’

  ‘Talking of taking too long, is there any word from O’Hare yet?’ asked Costello. ‘This is incredibly cruel.’

  Anderson shook his head. ‘It’s like a fair out there. And Irene would be none the wiser if it had been kept off social media. We will work with the film.’

  ‘OK, so on the film, there is a bit where they touch, she puts her hand on David’s jumper to steady him, a brief contact but it might be enough. Mathilda McQueen could get some DNA off the Hollister jumper. If it is the same jumper,’ she added. ‘Can you go back to the bit where she asks him for directions? Just look at his face as she leaves, he looks after her. A litt
le concerned? A little puzzled? About eight or nine minutes past nine?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Watch, he falls off the seat. Then she comes back having walked away, picks him up and checks the time. Why? Then he allows himself to be carried away to … well, to be nailed into a tea chest.’

  ‘If it is him,’ cautioned Walker.

  Costello pointed her pen at the screen. ‘I wonder if she slipped him a drug or injected him with something like an epi pen, a powered syringe? A “disabling insult” as a pathologist would say. Colin, you said Amy had black lines, like the body in the tea chest? Was Amy limping when she came up the steps? That knee was very badly damaged yet she wasn’t complaining?’

  ‘She said that she had been given something for the pain.’

  ‘Something that paralyses them and takes the pain away? Blondie was checking her watch to make sure it has had time to work. So how is it administered? Where is she getting it from? We need to know if they both have an injection site.’

  Anderson picked up his phone and asked to be put through to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

  Archie Walker picked up his phone and called exactly the same number.

  Mulholland and Wyngate found Matron Nicholson as welcoming as Costello had warned them.

  ‘This is really very inconvenient. If you want to speak to Mr Girasole then why can’t you do it at his home or his work?’ She studied their warrant cards very closely.

  ‘Because, he said he was coming back here,’ said Mulholland giving her the full benefit of his disarming smile. ‘We will be very quick.’

  They both got the impression that she was keeping them at the door for some internal argument to be settled, then she relented and opened the door wider. ‘He’ll be in Tosca, first floor, turn right out of the lift. It’s the door on the corner.’

  They climbed the stairs, Mulholland groaning about his leg and thinking that if he had been on his own he would have taken the lift.

  On the top landing Wyngate noticed a big blue bin sitting in an alcove with a computerized lock. ‘What is that?’ he asked.

  ‘I suspect it’s a drugs bin. Elvie was talking about them.’ He went to walk away, seeing the corridor turn at the far end of the lift doors. ‘Computerized drug distribution. Each nurse has a card, each patient a number. It’s a big computerized dosette box.’