by Alex Gray
A sudden thought came hard on the heels of her sense of contrition: what kind of guilt must Eric Chalmers be feeling?
As he sat rocking gently in Ruth’s nursing chair, Ashleigh cuddled in his arms asleep at last, Eric gazed around the room. The nursery had been decorated with a frieze of animals from Noah’s Ark, not because it was a biblical image but simply because they’d liked the vibrant colours and all the jolly cartoon animals parading behind a white-bearded Mr Noah. It was gender neutral, too, a fact that had counted when they’d made the decision to wait until the baby was born to see if it was a boy or a girl. Now that the blinds were drawn against the damaged window, it was a soothing sort of room: the pale yellow walls dancing with shadows cast by the mobile turning slowly above the baby’s crib. The fresh, clean lines of the white nursery furniture with its wicker baskets full of baby paraphernalia were now a source of pride, given that he’d sweated over the flat-packs this summer. Eric glanced up at the light shade suspended from the ceiling — a hot air balloon, its miniature aviator a Paddington Bear rescued out of the flotsam of his own childhood.
Somewhere downstairs, Ruth was preparing their evening meal and he should really be thinking about laying the baby down in her Moses basket until she woke again demanding her next feed. Just one meal enjoyed together would be a little respite from Ashleigh’s constant demands, if she would stay asleep. Eric shook his head, smiling: time spent here alone with the baby was so very special. He looked at his daughter’s tiny downy head and marvelled at how perfect she was: her baby skin quite flawless, her rosy mouth an exquisite Cupid’s bow. Such loveliness was breathtaking. No wonder Jesus had said, ‘For of such is the kingdom of God.’ Her innocence contrasted so sharply with all the errors of mankind. Whoever had made this mindless attack on their home had failed to touch the baby. In years to come she’d change from this state of grace, Eric thought with a pang of regret, those feathery eyelashes would be brushed with mascara, those lips smeared with artificial gloss.
Then suddenly he was remembering Julie; her long blonde hair swept back and the carefully made-up face, so pretty yet so vulnerable, and that expression in her eyes when she’d said how much she’d hated him.
Eric felt as if someone had dealt him a blow, so physical was the pain. He stifled the moan that wanted to escape from his lips.
But if he felt this way, a little voice chided him, what on earth was it like for Frank Donaldson, suffering the loss of his only child?
She was still awake when he came into the room, taking his shoes off as quietly as he could so he wouldn’t disturb her. Maggie heard the clothes falling on to the carpet then the duvet swishing as her husband slipped in beside her. Her hand reached out for his and she felt its warm clasp as the fingers closed over her own. For a moment they lay there, not speaking, each wrapped in their separate thoughts. He gave one small squeeze and the handclasp was released, then Maggie felt him turn on one side, ready for sleep.
Biting her lip, Maggie knew that if she couldn’t tell him now, then she never would.
She rehearsed what she would say: ‘I’ve got something I have to tell you.’ But even as the words came into her head, Maggie Lorimer’s courage deserted her. Sleep wasn’t going to come easily either, she knew, tossing and turning as her conscience niggled away at her. Heaving a sigh that she hoped wouldn’t disturb her husband, Maggie slipped out of bed and headed downstairs to the kitchen.
As she filled the teapot with boiling water from the kettle, Maggie gave an enormous sigh. What was it that had kept her from telling her husband what she had seen? Was she beginning to have doubts about Eric? At the end of the day it might make a difference, but right now they were depending on forensic evidence to show whether Eric had been present at the crime scene, Bill had told her. So here she was, shivering in her scanty nightdress, making tea, that panacea for all ills. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, the illustration on her tea caddy proclaimed. Maybe she should put a wee tot of whisky in it, Maggie thought wickedly, her sense of humour reasserting itself.
‘Couldn’t sleep?’
His voice made her spin round as she groped in the refrigerator for milk.
‘No. Lots on my mind,’ she said, conscious of her breath coming in short panicky bursts as if she’d been running.
‘Me too. Any chance that pot would stretch to another cup?’
She’d had her chance to tell him of the scene between Julie and Eric, but now, safe and warm under the bedclothes, Maggie tried to banish it from her mind.
They’d talked for ages, about Eric mostly: what he was like at school, what she thought of him, the sort of nice wholesome couple he and Ruth made. And he’d listened as she’d let all her frustration out about the rumourmongers on the staff who’d so upset her.
‘It isn’t fair!’ she’d murmured, snuggling into his shoulder. ‘Why do people think such horrible things?’
And Lorimer, feeling the emotion gradually ebb from her as sleep at last took its toll, wondered at her words. Why did some folk always assume the worst? Even among his own colleagues there were those who aired their negative opinions freely. He could tell from John Weir’s face that the young DC had already decided on Chalmers’ guilt; religion had a way of dividing people, he’d told Maggie gently.
And just because she protested her friend’s innocence didn’t mean she was right, though he was tactful enough to keep that little thought unsaid.
CHAPTER 27
They’d found the second body close to the Glasgow Veterinary School, just at the margin of their search, near to the building site that was to become the new Small Animal Hospital. The perimeter fence between the park and the Vet School had been diverted from its original demarcation months ago, the burial site now within the University’s new boundaries.
The third body was nowhere near the site of the other two.
Using geophysics had paid off; the disclosed grave in its hiding place deep within a screen of rhododendrons would almost certainly have been missed otherwise. Lorimer breathed a tiny sigh of relief; Mitchison had been carping on about the expenses mounting up in this case so now there was at least some justification for the series of modern police techniques that he’d set in motion. No murder investigation was ever cheap. There was always a careful balancing act to determine how much could be spent to achieve real progress and, now that it looked as if he had a multiple killer on the loose, Lorimer would be demanding even more resources.
So that was why he was standing inside the white tent with Dr Solomon Brightman by his side on this bright autumn morning.
‘All right?’ Lorimer asked quietly, seeing the psychologist put a folded handkerchief delicately to his mouth.
Solly nodded back, his eyes turned towards the hole in the ground that was becoming deeper by the minute as the white-suited woman below them carefully scraped away the mud and earth from around the body.
‘It’s more recent than the last one,’ Lorimer said, following Solly’s gaze. ‘Still has some remnants of clothing. That should be helpful.’
He noticed the man beside him swallow hard and knew that it was only by sheer effort of will that the psychologist was not throwing up outside in the bushes. That keen intellect was unfortunately combined with a weak stomach and Solly Brightman’s presence inside the tent was one more sign of how seriously he took his work, wanting to observe as much as he could before he began determining a profile.
‘We’ve not found any parallel in the entire UK for something like this,’ Lorimer told him. His team had already scoured HOLMES, the nationwide database that kept scrupulous details of murder cases on record, searching for a similar sort of MO in the hope that their killer could be identified. It was unlikely that any former killer would be at liberty to carry out these murders, though; most were either incarcerated in prisons or high-security mental hospitals, and there didn’t seem to be any unsolved cases that resembled this one.
‘Looks like she’s been strangled,’ Lorimer went on. ‘Th
e position of the head. .’ He tailed off as Solly nodded again. They could see the open mouth; the woman’s last gasp could have been a scream cut off by vicious hands.
‘Like the others, there’s been no attempt to cover the body with anything else — no blanket or anything — only earth dug up from the forest floor. Just how prepared was he, I wonder?’ Lorimer said, thinking aloud for Solly’s benefit. ‘Must have had a spade ready at hand; see these marks on either side of the grave? Just like the last two. Can you imagine it?’ There was no reply from the psychologist, however. What was going on in that dark head bowed so silently beside him? Was Solly seeing the same scenario? A car somewhere, not too far away, a shovel or spade in its boot, the intention to kill and bury his victim all part of the killer’s pattern of behaviour.
‘There’s no easy access to a path,’ Lorimer continued. ‘He’d have had to walk back to his car from the Maryhill entrance or over at Switchback Road then return to bury the victim. Wonder if he did it straight away,’ he mused, glancing sideways at Solly. ‘Or would he wait until nightfall?’
‘It would be too much of a risk to leave the corpses exposed,’ Solly replied at last. ‘Your forensic people say that the murders took place in the woods and there’s no sign yet that this one will be any different.’
‘Not bringing them here in the boot of his car, then,’ Lorimer said.
The two men stood silently for a minute, each remembering the first case that had brought them together. Three young women had been brutally killed and mutilated then dumped in St Mungo’s park. But that killer was now in a secure unit and whoever had perpetrated these new crimes certainly wasn’t copying his MO.
‘No. It’s not like the St Mungo murders, is it? He simply dumped them; there was never any attempt at burial.’ Lorimer pointed towards the open grave. ‘If Julie Donaldson and the other two women had been killed elsewhere then their killer would have chosen a safer burial place. Think of the bodies found in the gardens or under the floorboards of the killers’ homes.’
‘And even though he’s buried them in out-of-the-way places within the wood, it’s still close to human habitation.’ Solly lifted his head and indicated the muted sound of traffic beyond the Vet School. ‘Anyone might have found those girls. And he didn’t want them found,’ Solly murmured to himself as if he was already trying to probe the killer’s mind.
‘Why use the same area, then? If he’s not a risk-taker?’
‘That’s what makes this so interesting,’ the psychologist replied, watching the slow progress of uncovering the human remains a few feet away. ‘He knows what he’s doing on one level; on another he may seem to display quite normal behaviour.’ He turned to look up at Lorimer. ‘How else would he be able to lure these young women to their deaths?’
‘So we’re dealing with a psychopath.’
Solly smiled sadly and gave a non-committal shrug, but the Senior Investigating Officer’s face had grown grimmer as the scenario played itself out in his imagination. Who was this killer: a madman with periods of lucidity or an apparently normal person with bouts of manic behaviour?
He shivered suddenly, wondering if the schoolteacher who was so loved by his pupils might actually be hiding a terrible secret. His mind ticked off the men who had got away with multiple murders in the past, men whose home lives had seemed quite normal on the face of it but whose actions betrayed the evil deep inside. At least, he thought, they should be able to eliminate Kyle Kerrigan; especially if the DNA from each body showed a common set of strands. Lorimer looked up as a gust of wind blew some dried leaves on to the roof of the tent. How long had this woman been lying here, surrounded by the elements? Had foxes smelt her decaying corpse? Or had they slunk past the hidden grave night after night, foraging for other food? And what was the story behind her death?
The statistics in the missing persons register made grim reading: every year in the Strathclyde region alone more than sixteen thousand people went missing. Some would have chosen it that way, deliberately cutting themselves off from their past for reasons of their own but many, he knew, must have met with tragedies that were still to be uncovered. The records were further complicated by so many foreign nationals coming to work or study in Scotland for relatively short periods of time, some of them slipping through the bureaucratic net that struggled to contain them all. Who were they, these two young women whose decomposed bodies now lay in Glasgow City Mortuary? The forensic pathologists were working their socks off trying to find identification that could match up with a woman whose relatives were anxious to find her. The third victim was, like the others, a young female, possibly around eighteen to twenty, maybe even younger. Each girl had been strangled and there were signs of compression on their rib cages, showing a similar MO. Not only that, but the way each grave had been dug indicated that it had been done by the same perpetrator. What was left of the latest body’s clothing was now undergoing intensive forensic examination and Lorimer fervently hoped that there would be something that would show who she had been and where she had come from.
His team’s actions today included a search of Eric Chalmers’ home and car as well as interviewing the close relatives and friends of the Donaldson family. Multiple killers were sometimes known to their victims and if Lorimer could find a link between anyone in Julie’s circle and these other murders, then this case could really be pushed forward. Meantime, Solly Brightman was looking for the type of criminal mind behind these acts of murder. Lorimer could only hope that the psychologist might come up with a profile that fitted someone who was already within the net he had cast around this area of Glasgow.
‘Do you realise just how much this is all costing us?’ Mitchison’s voice rose in a crescendo of disbelief, waving the figures for the ongoing case as close to Lorimer’s nose as he could. ‘Profilers don’t come cheap these days, you know.’
‘I do, actually,’ Lorimer replied, keeping his tone as level as he could manage. He’d like to have taken the man by his Armani lapels and shaken him. What price can you put on the lives of three young women and bringing their killer to justice? he wanted to demand. But with Mitchison it paid to be cool and distant, a tactic that suited the DCI perfectly. His superior officer would just love Lorimer to lose his temper, any excuse to record one more black mark against the man whose presence within the Division irked Mitchison so much. They’d never rubbed along since Mitchison had been promoted over Lorimer’s head and the officers within the Division continued to show a marked partiality towards their DCI. He should probably have moved by now, Lorimer thought absently, tried for promotion elsewhere within Strathclyde or further afield. And it might come to that yet, but real life — in the form of serious crime — had a habit of getting in the way of any plans he might make for his own career prospects.
‘I’m not happy that you took so long to hand over the Fraser case,’ Mitchison began again, his eyes cold with suppressed anger.
Lorimer sighed, not caring to hide his feelings this time. ‘I thought we’d agreed on this,’ he said, shaking his head slightly in disbelief. ‘Kim Fraser wanted me to continue as SIO and I wasn’t about to let her down with a thump. DI Grant has taken over the running of the case now but I still have an overview of the proceedings.’
‘Sounds a tad egoistic to me,’ Mitchison scoffed. ‘You’re not the only senior officer who thinks they’ve been endowed with people skills.’
Lorimer felt his jaw tighten; he wouldn’t rise to this bait. It simply wasn’t worth it.
‘Public opinion in the shape of the press might easily turn against us if it looks as though we’re giving up on finding Nancy,’ Lorimer reminded his superintendent.
A gruff noise in Mitchison’s throat that might have been the sound of acquiescence was all the response Lorimer had before one final glare was shot in his direction. The DCI’s sigh of relief as the door closed behind his senior officer was tempered with a sense of irritation. With two major cases ongoing among his team, Lorimer didn’t need his t
ime wasted like this. And surely Mitchison knew that?
‘Strathclyde Police,’ the man had announced, showing his identity card and a paper that he said was a warrant to take the car away for examination.
Eric Chalmers stood in his doorway for a moment, his brain trying to focus on what was going on. ‘But why. .?’
‘Got orders to take this vehicle away, sir. All part of our inquiry. If you’ll just sign this receipt and let me have the keys, that’s right, just here.’
It was over so quickly that Eric still stood on his doorstep, a feeling of unreality sweeping over him as he watched the stranger back his Fiat out and drive away, followed by the second officer in a black Citroлn. The sound of his baby’s cry made Eric turn back into the house, but before he closed the door a flash of curtain from across the street drew his attention to the fact that at least one of his neighbours had been watching this little scene. Part of him wanted to slam the door shut, but another more mischievous side urged him to put up two angry fingers. Eric Chalmers did neither, closing the door quietly and making his way upstairs with a heaviness in his step that was nothing to do with yet another sleepless night from Ashleigh’s constant crying.
‘What is it?’ Ruth looked up from where she was standing by the baby’s changing mat. ‘Someone at the door?’
He looked at her pale face, as sleep-deprived as his own, and shook his head. ‘It’s okay. I’ll tell you later. Can I do anything to help?’
‘I’ve a load of baby things to get from the supermarket. Can you drive over for me?’
With a sinking heart, Eric shook his head, suddenly aware that he had no car to fill with the endless lists of stuff that seemed so necessary for this tiny person. And now he was going to have to tell his wife exactly why that was.