Standing Still

by Caro Ramsay

  ‘With all kinds of drugs in there?’

  Mulholland walked back and tapped his colleague on the upper arm. ‘Only the everyday stuff. Nothing that might paralyse you. It’ll be full of laxatives, beta blockers and diuretics. Not anabolic steroids. Or strychnine. Now, come on.’

  They heard the sweet strains of an operatic aria from outside the door marked Tosca.

  ‘La Bohème,’ said Mulholland.

  ‘Really,’ replied Wyngate, knocking the door.

  Paolo answered, showing less annoyance than the matron had. He glanced back into the room. ‘Come in, she’s sleeping.’

  They crept into the room, large and full of the warm breeze drifting on through the open windows, wafting around an expensive perfume of musk. The old lady sat in a wheelchair, her head tilted at an angle, a scarf round her shoulders. The view was superb.

  Wyngate commented on it.

  ‘She deserves it. She still has good sight, something she can enjoy.’

  ‘Just one question.’ Mulholland pulled a photograph from the file he was carrying.

  ‘Do you recognize this woman, just on the off chance? She might be from round these parts.’ Mulholland handed over the colour copy of Claire’s photograph of the blonde woman.

  Paolo’s blue eyes stared at the photograph and the atmosphere in the room tightened. His bottom lip started to quiver a little, a hand went up to his mouth, a sleeve rub over his chin. He turned to check that the old lady was still asleep.

  Wyngate and Mulholland looked at each other.

  ‘So you do recognize her?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ He looked from one detective to the other, but his mouth was curled a little in confusion. He walked towards the door, guiding them out the room and closing the door behind them to continue the conversation in the corridor.

  ‘So you know who she is?’

  ‘No, do you?’ He recovered himself. ‘I mean, she has the look of somebody I used to know but she’d be about, God, sixty by now.’ He peered at the photograph again. ‘Looking closer, there’s a little resemblance but not much. She was a pal of mine, well, more a friend of a friend. So sorry, don’t know her. This woman is far too young.’ He shrugged and tried to hand the photograph back.

  Neither police officer took it.

  ‘Can you tell me her name? The name of the woman she looks like.’

  Paolo breathed out slowly. ‘Not really, Paula? Pauline? Something like that. She hung around with a guy I used to know.’ He creased his face up and tapped the photograph with his forefinger. ‘It’s the haircut, same haircut. That’s all.’ He smiled. ‘And the Duchess is the only woman I know who has had the same do for twenty years.’

  They walked slowly down the stone steps of the care home, Wyngate phoning in the info for the board. Mulholland phoning home to ask his girlfriend Elvie McCulloch, who was a medic, if she knew of any drug that would have the effect they were looking for.

  Costello was telling Wyngate that the picture of the blonde woman provoked no response from David’s mother either. She had no idea who she was.

  ‘Well, that is interesting,’ said Wyngate, ‘because Paolo Girasole definitely knew who she was. He just wasn’t for telling us.’

  By midnight Anderson was sitting at his desk at home, Nesbit snoring gently at his feet. He was watching the tape back and forward on his iPad, playing around with it, using the computer’s ability to focus in on an area. They were looking around David for the woman they had called Blondie, no matter what Paolo Girasole said.

  Every time he heard that name, Anderson couldn’t think why it meant something to him. Something more than chips and ice cream. Girasole? He had come across the name recently, written down in black type; he could see it in his mind’s eye. But he couldn’t think where.

  He was watching the CCTV half paying attention, thankful for the fact that the average Glaswegian is filmed over three hundred times a day while on a city centre walkabout. He had found a section, around half eight where David had his initial encounter with Blondie; it looked like a stumble in a bottleneck on a narrow pavement. He was strolling, in no hurry at a point north of Papyrus, when she was about a foot behind him. There was a slight bump, an apology. Had she picked him out already?

  Anderson was looking for faces that might appear more than once. He had accepted Costello’s point that one woman would find it difficult to abduct a boy like David on her own. He was looking for an accomplice. But everybody seemed to be facing the other way, going about their business. Anderson followed Blondie out of the range of that camera, then up a side street where she disappeared. He picked her up again on the original piece of video Mulholland had put on the disc from the camera on the Vinicombe Street/Byres Road junction. He scanned the pictures, his fingers on the screen honing in on images of faces and enlarging them. His eyes settled on a woman standing in a dark spot, easily missed but doing exactly what he was looking for somebody doing; walking up and down a little.

  Anderson focused in on her. She looked at her watch a few times then back up Byres Road, up Vinicombe Street, waiting for somebody. The woman continued her casual stroll back and forth. A few times the view of the street was obscured by the camera angle being blocked out by a high-sided vehicle stopping, probably for a delivery. The screen went black.

  He waited and took a sip of the now cold, black coffee, watching the time roll on past nine o’clock. Was she waiting to meet David? Why? Why not at the café where David had been waiting? Or was this the accomplice? That didn’t make sense, she was too weak, too small, slim, well dressed. Formally dressed even. In a skirt, black tights on a bright summer morning. Black shoes, a jacket. She looked as if she was going to her work. Early on a Sunday morning, on parade day? Waiting for a lift? In a dead end? It was the most stupid place in the world to wait for a vehicle. So there was another reason for her to be there. He put his fingers to the laptop screen, opening them up to enlarge the image, trying for the optimum of details before the loss of fine details of pixilation. He got her as close as he could get but the features of her face began to blur. He could see dark hair swept back and a scarf of some kind round her neck, like cabin crew. All he could see was dark. The collar of her jacket was open at the front with something hanging there. As she turned her head, the screen blacked out again and Anderson swore gently. This case was like that, see something, then it’s gone. He was so tired, a dull insistent headache was pulsing quietly behind one eye. He didn’t know if more coffee was a good or bad idea. He took another sip. Nesbitt stretched, sticking his claws into Anderson’s ankle. Instead of winding the film on, he waited for the vehicle to move, to wait for the lights to change or the cop on duty to wave him through. Anderson looked at the clock, it was moving on but he was getting the sneaking feeling that Blondie wasn’t going to get caught out. Where Blondie had walked, she had been in the crowd, obliterated almost as if she had known. Even his eagle-eyed daughter had not caught a good likeness of her. Was that intentional? Or was she lucky? Maybe her companion might draw her out, standing in the street, easily seen.

  But so far, all they had was that bane of good police work, stinking bad luck. He was getting ahead of himself, they had no real evidence of anything really. Blondie might have nothing to do with any of it. She might have known him, taken him round the corner out of the sun, away from the buzz of the street corner. Maybe she had no connection with him at all but was a nurse or some kind of care worker who genuinely thought she was witnessing the start of an epileptic fit and had taken him out of the busy street, somewhere quiet in case he went into grand mal. And he had come to harm at some later point. But David was not epileptic. Maybe there was something else storming his brain? Drugs? A tumour?

  But then how did he end up dead, folded up in a tea chest three streets away, on the opposite side of a busy road. If it was him, but deep down he thought, how could it not be? The timeline was tight, but the clothes? It was hard to argue with the identical clothes. He checked his mobile again, st
ill no word from O’Hare; their last conversation had been a little blunt, ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ Anderson had worked with the hoary old git for a long time and knew there was something that the pathologist was not telling him. He could sniff it. Irene Kerr had been on the phone every hour on the hour. Anderson wished O’Hare would, or could, say yes or no, was it her son or not? It couldn’t be that bloody difficult, but O’Hare was not going to be rushed. The face was curled into the body, and any attempt to unwind it could lose evidence and there was no second chance at that.

  Amy was doing OK. He was getting updates on her. She was in for twenty-four-hour observation and they had found an injection site on her upper arm. Anderson looked at the time on the laptop; it was going on for midnight. For now David Kerr was a missing person. And there had been a suspicious death. There still had to be a direct and provable connection between those two facts.

  The black van had moved away from the screen. He watched. The woman had turned her head and pinned her black hair back against her ears, and as she did so the pattern on the front of her jacket moved. It was a lanyard, with an ID on it? He couldn’t make out the words, or the logo, but it was faint, light coloured. A bank? The council? Open on a Sunday? He didn’t think so. It was a street collector’s badge, no doubt to accompany one of the floats. He needed to find out which one.

  The door of the room opened, it was Claire, dressed in leggings and a sweatshirt that reached her knees. She had her big sloggy socks on, a smoothie in her hand.

  ‘You not going to bed?’ he asked.

  ‘I could ask you the same thing,’ she replied.

  ‘I’m the parent, you are the child.’

  ‘Have you found David yet?’

  He shook his head.

  She leaned against the doorpost, and pointed to his laptop. ‘Are you still looking for him?’

  ‘Course we are, Claire, of course we are.’

  ‘So he is not the body then?’

  ‘We don’t know one way or the other.’

  She pulled a bit of a face. ‘Shame if it was, shame for somebody else if it isn’t him.’ Her face creased up, she had seen too much random tragedy for such a short life.

  He indicated the woman with the dark hair in the suit, and Claire gave her a good look, but didn’t recall her, amongst all those collecting for charity on the parade route.

  Claire slopped off, either back upstairs to bed or to the kitchen.

  He forwarded the film to watch the parade, making notes of the organizations and noticed that most of them seemed to have bold colours and strong images. Whoever this lady was, if she was waiting to collect for a charity then it was charity with a low profile and that in itself did not make sense.

  He was jotting down the name of a school band that had marched past when a float drove by, moving slowly, not a lot going on. There was a hospital bed aboard, people waving, cogs and wheels on the float and above the cab at the front was a logo of white with writing, fine writing in light and dark blue. The same as the image on the badge. So who were they? He looked at the time, the float had been at the top end of parade, easy to track them down and find out who she was. Then he had an idea. He was about to pick up the phone and ruin somebody’s sleep. Then the phone went as he held it in his palm; it was O’Hare.

  The pathologist was curt. ‘I think you should bring her down. Now.’

  ‘Who, Irene?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Colin, you asked me to you call you “as soon as”. This is “as soon as”. Trust me on this. Can you confirm that David Kerr had drunk a can of Appletiser and eaten a nut bar or something before he was abducted?’

  ‘Yes. He’s on the CCTV doing it. Why?’

  ‘OK, I don’t mind following protocol, Colin, but not when it is cruel. So go and get Irene Kerr and bring her here. To the mortuary. Now.’

  In the end it was the faithful Maggie who brought a snivelling and white-faced Irene to the mortuary. They both looked dead eyed, ghosting around the seated area.

  Anderson joined them. ‘I confess that this is news to me.’

  They went in; he held open the doors for them.

  ‘Did he suffer?’ was the first thing she asked.

  ‘We don’t know if it is your son yet, Mrs Kerr, I am not hiding anything from you. I know as much as you do. I am sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know how he came to this. How did this happen, why did it happen to him?’ She was setting off on her well-trodden story. Her son was a lovely boy. Reminding herself more than anybody else, as she really believed that bad things don’t happen to good people.

  She stopped walking along the corridor, turning to face Anderson. She placed the palm of her hand on his jacket. ‘You know, I always thought I would have time. I can’t believe he has gone. The plans we made, the things we had planned to do. I was going to watch him grow into a man, meet a girl, get married. He would have been a good dad. He was going camping later in the year to France, with Innes and Winston, if he was well enough, have a gap year. You have no idea what his dad said to me when I told him he was missing.’

  ‘Caroline, the policewoman, took the phone and explained,’ added Maggie, ‘when you phoned him the first time he said that he thought David was OK, you can’t—’

  ‘He kept saying that he knew David would be OK and that he would turn up somewhere safe and sound. So clinical, but you know I am still his wife. He is David’s father. But there was no poor, poor David. What I am going to do without him, without my boy?’

  Anderson opened another door, into a waiting room. ‘Do you have other children, Mr Anderson, other than Claire, I mean?’

  ‘I have a son, a little younger than David.’

  ‘Do you think Claire was the last person who talked to David? I wonder if that was the last nice thing that happened to him.’ She stared at Anderson, she looked older, creased, pathetic.

  Anderson was incredibly grateful when the door opened and O’Hare came in, looking a little flustered.

  ‘Mrs Kerr, I am the forensic pathologist.’ He shoved his steel-rimmed glasses further up his nose, not really paying any attention to her at all.

  The woman looked at him tearfully, somehow comforted that a scientist was now on the scene. O’Hare pulled the waistband of his trousers up and tucked the tip of his tie back into his belt.

  ‘Mrs Kerr, I am going to ask you to do something that breaks all the rules. I want you to look at the body, see if you can identify him. Tell me if this young man is your son?’

  Colin Anderson stared at his old friend. ‘Can I have a word, Prof, outside please?’

  ‘No, I want to,’ intervened Irene.

  ‘Of course you want to, anything is better than not knowing. We could be ages waiting for the DNA to come back,’ said O’Hare giving Anderson a hard look as he headed towards the door. Irene Kerr was energized and followed him. Anderson followed them both out of the room, O’Hare wafting away Anderson’s protests that this really was against procedure.

  In the morgue, they stood behind the glass wall. Anderson continued his protests getting quieter as he realized that any noises he made were going to make a bad situation worse. It was quiet apart from the hum and breath of the air system. The body lay in front of them, covered in a white sheet.

  Anderson had seen enough bodies to know this one was odd. Not with the usual contour of a supine form. The knees stuck up a little, too much of a peak, and his shoulder created another little mound of white sheet lower than it should have been.

  ‘Are you OK,’ asked O’Hare, looking directly at Irene for the first time.

  ‘I want to see him.’ Her chin came up, calm, resolute. Anderson stepped back, O’Hare was right, the worst thing was not knowing.

  Anderson turned away, cupping his hands to his eyes and waited for the screaming, the cries, the outpouring of human grief of the worst kind; a mother for her only son.

  But all he heard was the gentle thump of Irene Kerr hi
tting the floor.

  David Kerr was groggy. He lay, trying to wake up, knowing that something very wrong had happened. His head hurt and his body felt weird, like he had recovered from a very bad dose of the flu. His right shoulder ached with a deep warmth that might have felt comforting – if he could move himself away from it. But he couldn’t. He opened his eyes but the mere act of lifting an eyelid took a lot of effort. So he stopped trying.

  He thought he might have died, but he was wrong. He had been asleep. He might have been unconscious but he did know, definitely, that there was a little light filtering through his eyelids, so he tried to open them again to try to make sense of it all. Rafters. A ceiling high above him. Not the sunken lights of his bedroom ceiling, not the pale blue paint he had picked with …

  With? And there his memory stopped. And there was the scent of polish, and wood glue. The dead have no sense of smell so he made the effort to keep his eyes open.

  The skylight he could see was so filthy, cracked and cobwebbed it allowed very little light in, but he got the impression that there was sunlight outside somewhere. There were bars across the skylight, and he could see trees on the inside. So he was outside but inside?

  So he lay, glimpsing the skylight, thinking that if he snuck up on it, he might see it properly before his brain intervened and distorted it.

  What was going on up there? In the trees? And why was he not out there? He had the vague taste of apples in his mouth? He had an image of red scarves and red petals. The words rolling down the river swam in his head. He had no idea why.

  He felt light, floaty. He could see the sky, feel the mattress under him, and smell the glue. He could taste apple and hear traffic from somewhere and quiet clattering, as if his mum was downstairs filling the dishwater. He had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see something to his left, a plastic bag. And a pipe that curled in and out of his eyeline before disappearing down below his waist. He tried to follow it with his eyes, lifting his head to see further, to discover what it was and where it went.