by Alex Gray
Perhaps he’d caught something in her mood for Solly’s arm came around her shoulders, hugging her closer, and she let her head sink gratefully onto his shoulder, glad to have his strength while still mourning her own weakness. It would take time, the surgeon had warned her. She’d been lucky, so many of her fellow medics had stated once they’d known the extent of her injuries and how close she’d come to the brink. Rosie shuddered and Solly rubbed her arm as though to warm her. It was something they didn’t talk about any more. What was the point? She had a future to think about and that was reason enough to feel positive, wasn’t it?
But the thought of Detective Chief Inspector Lorimer and the missing toddler had been planted into her mind now and Rosie’s eyes no longer saw the shifting clouds or the change in the hills as the shadows lengthened. Her work had taken her into many distressing situations before and she had enough imagination to see just what that young mother must be feeling: such pain, such terrible, unbelievable pain.
It was the sort of pain that nobody really understood. A pain so deep inside that it couldn’t be touched, let alone seen or felt. Last night he had woken to find moonlight streaming through the curtains, even though he’d closed them against the night; the brightness had seeped into the room, insidious like his pain, making him want to shed his skin as though he were a snake. It didn’t belong to him, this covering over his bones. It itched and irritated him beyond human endurance, making him feel a restlessness that had driven him from his bed to pace up and down the house, going from room to room in the half-dark, never able to hide from that all-seeing, unforgiving moon. Raging with thirst, he’d gulped water poured straight from the kettle then wiped his mouth, feeling his swollen lips and the dry patches where he had bitten them over and over in an effort to keep from screaming. A sudden chill had crept over his flesh and set him sneezing, the sound making him wake properly to realise that he was shivering uncontrollably. Wrapping his arms around his naked body, he’d shuffled hastily back to the warmth of his bed then, whimpering, curled onto his side, foetus-like, hiding from the all-seeing moon.
Now he lay sweating, remembering the horrors of the night. No one could ever feel what he could feel, see what he could see: his pain was his alone, no matter how much other people tried to tell him that they understood. Could they crawl inside his skin? Inside his head?
Only another bright angel could soothe away this sort of pain with an everlasting kiss.
It was hard to see the world outside going about its business: children chattering noisily as they were led to the bus stop, just as they’d done on the morning when Nancy had been snatched. That her own life had stopped didn’t seem to matter to anybody else; the world still turned on its axis, night becoming day and such sleep as she managed disturbed by nightmares of monsters doing dreadful things to her daughter. Kim’s eyes were dried and flaky with so much weeping, their lids red and sore where she’d rubbed them over and over. How could daylight appear and life still go on like this? She clasped her cold hands together as yet another child ran laughing past her window. With every passing day a sinking in her heart told her she would never see her Nancy again. Kim slumped into a chair, too weak to stand and watch the morning parade of kiddies going to school, their tiny hands held by watchful mothers. As the tears flowed down her cheeks, she didn’t even bother to wipe them away; they were part of her now, like this hollow, cancerous pain that grew inside her. She’d even given it a name. Despair.
Mum had tried to comfort her, but it was all just a torrent of words raging over her, making her think too much about what might have happened. It was the not knowing that killed her heart, and the realisation that she was a bad mother. That was what everyone would be saying, she thought, castigating herself for the hundredth time. If she hadn’t let Nancy go out the front . . . Kim bent over, rocking back and forth as the keening cry of pain was torn from her lips.
Maggie Lorimer hummed along to the jingle on the radio, one eye on the traffic streaming along on either side of her. Just a wee bit further ahead and she’d signal, make for the inside lane and prepare to turn off the motorway. It was a routine she had honed to such perfection that she sometimes thought the car could drive itself to school without her help. It was one of these mornings that made you feel good to be alive, she thought, bright and blue with just a sweep of white cloud above the city skyline. Despite the awfulness of the previous days, she couldn’t help but respond to this feeling of newness and opportunity. Maybe the kids would feel it too, she told herself hopefully. She had a timetable full of interesting topics for them today, things to take their minds off the twin subjects of playground talk: Julie Donaldson and Eric Chalmers. Manson had been spot on when he’d told them to keep Kyle Kerrigan occupied in the wake of his father’s release from jail; who’d have thought that such instructions would soon be extended to the entire school? The head teacher was right, though; school work was the best possible panacea for the sort of anguish the kids were facing and Maggie Lorimer had prepared some of her favourite lessons. Old Possum’s ‘Growltiger’s Last Stand’ for her First Years, a strip cartoon exercise of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for S2, then that board game she’d invented on The Cone-Gatherers for her Intermediate Ones. Hands-on stuff, it would also keep them mentally challenged and away from any thoughts of what was happening in the world of crime and detection.
That was a problem for their teacher, though. Both of her worlds were in collision: Muirpark and home. Despite the fact that his wife was a member of staff, DCI Lorimer was still the SIO on this murder case. He’d been told that Maggie’s inside knowledge might prove useful so there had been no expression of a conflict of interest. Well, that was Strathclyde Police’s take on the case, but it didn’t stop her feeling uneasy about her own husband coming into school. She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she hardly noticed the traffic being swallowed up by the Clyde Tunnel. The roar of cars echoed as they swept down under the river, the curving tunnel walls glistening like the innards of some ancient worm, its spine a white light against ribs of darkness. Then they were out again into a fresh morning, the sky bright above tree-lined avenues of red sandstone houses, the very air charged with respectability. Maggie preferred this route, winding in and out of these affluent West End terraces until she came back down to Partick and the bumpy ascent to the school gates. The Expressway might be quicker, but by now she’d had enough of being immersed in lanes of traffic. Besides, she liked to look at these houses with their neatly-trimmed hedges and twin bay trees either side of the front doors. She enjoyed this part of the journey best at Christmas, for all the residents appeared to purchase real fir trees, huge affairs placed in the windows and lit up for all to see.
The thought took her back to Jenkins’ The Cone-Gatherers and the spite and hurt that the book had contained. There had been a death in that story, too, and anger and grief. She had to stop at the lights and in those few moments her eyes fell on a billboard outside a newsagent’s shop. WHAT HAPPENED TO JULIE? The headlines shouted at her. Maggie bit her lip as she drove the final part of her journey. Would she really be able to give them something to take their minds off this tragedy?
‘Mr Chalmers would have wanted us to keep going,’ the Sixth Form girl said, her voice sweet with what she hoped was an understanding tone. The younger kids all gazed up at her, respecting her position as their House prefect. Mr Chalmers had been Head of Clyde House but now he wasn’t there and rumours were flying around the school about why he had gone.
‘You know we have all this fundraising to do and that our chosen topic this term is Malawi? Well, let’s show the other houses that we can do better than they can. Agreed?’
A faint chorus of ‘yes’ made the girl shake her head.
‘Come on, you can sound a bit more enthusiastic than that!’ She smiled, egging them on.
‘Yes!’ came back stronger this time, a few First Years sitting cross-legged at the front showing a genuine eagerness.
Maggie Lorimer, sit
ting at the back of the gym hall, nodded her approval. Frances Lane was doing a grand job with Clyde and she’d make sure that the girl’s efforts were recorded in any House report she’d be writing. Eric would have been proud of her, she thought wistfully. Muirpark was a product of the seventies’ expansion of comprehensive secondary schools when directives about what constituted good teaching practice had been implemented across the entire country. Successive head teachers had grafted on their own ideas, one of them being the House system. Each House had been named after Glasgow rivers: Clyde, Kelvin, the White Cart and the Molindiner Burn, though the latter was in truth a mere trickle under the necropolis. It had once been frowned upon by some parents as too middle class but the Harry Potter books had succeeded in popularising Muirpark’s arrangement of splitting the pupils into four different houses. One up for children’s literature, Maggie had thought, on overhearing a particularly enthusiastic Primary 7 boy during their orientation day before the summer holidays.
The bell rang just as Frances was ending her spiel about charities and several hundred feet clattered out of the gym hall towards the playground and the main building.
‘Walk!’ a voice commanded and Maggie glanced across at Jack Armour, the deputy head, who was covering Eric’s House duties. Things were settling down to a semblance of normality, she thought.
It could be just an ordinary day in any ordinary school were it not for the piles of shop-bought flowers heaped by the school gate and their hand-written messages of condolence. That was something none of them could pretend to ignore.
PC Brian Maxwell was almost enjoying the swishing sound of the damp grasses against his boots when his feet slipped and he had to throw out a hand to steady himself. They’d fanned out in a line again this morning, tracking an area near to the Vet School, uniformed officers with their heads down, still intent on their search for the missing girl. Maxwell stood up sharply, fishing around with his stick to see what had caused this sudden depression in the earth. They were trained to be alert to the least little difference in the terrain and although it was probably no more than a rabbit hole, he would look just to make sure.
At first sight it looked like a tree root exposed by an animal burrowing deep within the soil, but when he dropped to his knees for a closer look, PC Maxwell’s mouth dropped open in horror. There, at the end of what he’d taken to be a thin dark root, were smaller twig-like bits splayed out in the unmistakable shape of a human hand.
‘Hoi! Over here!’ His voice came out clear in the morning air despite a hoarseness that was clogging up his throat. They’d all been looking for a corpse but none of them wanted to be the one to make this discovery.
Dr Daniel Murphy crouched beside the area that had been excavated within the woods. It was not so very far from that other crime scene where Julie Donaldson’s body had been found, but one look at this showed that the victim had been placed into its grave years before. The forensic archaeologists and botanists were going to have a field day with this one, he told himself, scraping more dirt away from the skeletal remains. Two corpses found while looking for a missing toddler, Dan shook his head; what were the statistical chances of that happening? Still, it would make for an interesting real life story when it came his turn to lecture to Glasgow University’s evening course on forensic medical science. Rosie Fergusson usually took a couple of the classes but Dan was looking forward to filling in for her during her sick leave. Flashes popped around him as the SOCOs took photo after photo at the scene of crime manager’s direction; every image would be needed to build up a true account of the discovered corpse, especially if this new case ever made it into a court of law. Hours of work lay ahead of them even before the remains could be moved and so a large white tent had been erected, covering the site and its nearby surroundings. Overnight rain had left the grass sodden and there were puddles in the yellow mud where the heavy machinery from the construction of the new Vet School buildings now lay useless until the police were finished with this scene of crime. When that would be was anybody’s guess and there had been more than a few grumbles from the foreman in charge of the project.
Dr Murphy did not turn around as the man came into the tent and hunkered down beside him.
‘Lorimer? Aye, thought it’d be you. Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ Dan glanced sideways at the shadowy figure next to him. ‘Mind you, our Rosie always tells us that you don’t like to believe in coincidences, isn’t that right?’ The Irishman’s voice had a hearty quality to it that was at odds with the macabre setting.
‘I don’t,’ Lorimer told him shortly. ‘And I’ll be much happier once you’ve taken this back to the mortuary and we can see everything more clearly.’
‘Ah, you’re right there, Detective Chief Inspector. We haven’t found the skull yet, but I think meself it can’t be far away,’ Murphy replied cheerily, pointing towards the half-dug grave with one gloved finger.
The day had brightened by mid-morning, giving the illusion of a warm summer’s day to come. But since noon, grey clouds had obliterated any trace of blue and now the first fat drops were falling on the tarpaulin covering the shallow grave. Lorimer sat back on his heels, feeling the sweat trickling down under the white boiler-suit. As he looked out, he could see the perimeter fence had long since been cut through to make space for the heavy plant that had cleared part of the woodland floor where the new Small Animal Hospital would be built. The area below the construction site ended in a muddy culvert, marking a natural barrier between the flat ground and the steep slope running parallel to the path above. It was an ideal hiding place: there was plenty of grass and moist soil that would be easy to dig, unlike the upper area with its tangle of tree roots. The slope itself must have hidden the killer from view.
To his left lay the Vet School, a cluster of pale buildings with one grey brick edifice towering over the rest of the outbuildings. Despite all the upheaval caused by the builders, the university’s life still went on and Lorimer could see a woman and a young man tending to a piebald horse where it stood in one corner strewn with piles of straw, their eyes fixed on the animal rather than on what was happening within the crime scene tent.
It had been a lot of work for the SOCOs, but worth all their painstaking effort. Now the grave had been properly excavated, showing the dark layers of subsoil beneath the lighter topsoil and possibly much, much more besides. These spade marks would come up particularly well, he thought, looking at the sides of the hole; grass and flowers had returned to grow on top though these species would be examined and compared to the other flora round about to see what they might reveal. They’d sieved for ages, taking care to preserve each and every piece of evidence, especially the bones. As the rain continued to patter down on the roof of the tent, Lorimer felt the sense of a job well done. Now it would be down to pathologists and forensic scientists as well as the archaeology team at Glasgow University’s specialist unit to make sense of all of this.
It was hours before the grave had given up all its contents and now the DCI was standing a little behind the pathologist in the mortuary room, both men gazing down at the pile of bones that had been reassembled into what should have been an entire skeleton. One of the femur bones was missing, probably taken by a fox, Dr Murphy had suggested, though after careful digging the skull had been recovered. The depression on the ground had been caused by the body sinking deeper into its grave as decomposition had taken place, Murphy had explained. Foxes might well have uncovered bits as they’d foraged for food. Lorimer had swallowed hard, not wanting to imagine the process. But it did explain why the constable had tripped in the hollow.
‘It’ll take time, but once we’ve examined the bones there’ll be more information to tell us when she was murdered and left to rot in that place.’
‘Now I look on this as a possible murder, certainly a suspicious death, but is there any actual evidence to show that?’ Lorimer asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ Murphy replied cheerfully, ‘D’ye see that?’ He pointed towards the
area between the skull and the upper torso. ‘One snapped hyoid bone,’ he announced, ‘she was possibly strangled. And look at these.’ His hand circled the upper part of the skeleton and Lorimer saw what he meant; the ribcage had been badly crushed.
‘Perhaps something heavy was laid on top of her? Weighing her down?’ Lorimer suggested; playing devil’s advocate was one way to glean more information from the pathologist.
‘No, no, we would be able to see differences on the actual skeletal remains; this one’s been buried in soil, nothing more. We’ll have the botanists’ report to confirm that, of course.’
‘How long do you reckon she’d been buried?’
‘Hm, you want me to give a reasonable estimate at this stage?’ The pathologist cocked his head to one side in response to the DCI’s question. ‘Certainly less than five years.’ He leaned forwards. ‘See the tags of soft tissue here and here?’ Murphy pointed with his scalpel. ‘Shows she’s not been there all that long, really. Decomposition in a Scottish soil might take a few months or even a couple of years, depending on the time of year she was killed.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘We’ll know more once we have samples under the microscope; the percentage of nitrogen in the bones helps us to be more specific about how long it’s been since she died.’
‘Can you give any indication yet of the victim’s age?’
Murphy stepped back a little from the surgical table as though appraising a work of art. ‘Mm, she wasn’t elderly, that’s for sure. No wisdom teeth had developed and from the size of the bones and the shape of her pelvis, we’d probably give a range of between fourteen and twenty. Glad we found the skull intact,’ he announced gleefully. As Murphy glanced up at Lorimer, the DCI had the distinct impression that the pathologist was as delighted about this discovery as a small boy with a new toy to play with.