Falling Fast

by Neil Broadfoot

  Five minutes after getting into bed, he had padded through to the kitchen, pulled the largest knife he could find from the drawer and slipped it under the bed, within hand’s reach. Having it there helped him settle. But not much.

  As he lay there, chewing on paracetamol to dull the throbbing in his side, he tried to make sense of everything that had happened. He thought about Sam McGinty as he forced him out of the door, face a sneer of hate. Remembered his warning: I see you again, I’ll kill you. Could it have been Sam who attacked him last night? Doug didn’t think so. Oh, Sam had the rage for such an attack, but after his warning yesterday, Doug knew he wouldn’t have been satisfied with just leaving a couple of bruises.

  His mind jumped from question to question like an old record butchered by a dull stylus. What the hell was going on?

  He tried to add up everything he knew, testing out different variations to see what he was missing. There was still something nagging at the back of his mind – the way the name of an album or film star leaps into the shadows the moment someone asks you for it – but he couldn’t place it. He tried to forget about it, concentrate instead on what he knew. Giving up on the pretence of sleep, he padded through to the living room, knife in hand, and sat down with a notepad, writing down what he knew as a timeline.

  Katherine Buchan had fallen to her death from the Scott Monument. Shortly afterward, he got a call telling him it was no accident, that McGinty had killed her. Then came the photo proving that the two knew each other. Who had made that call, sent that photograph? Doug circled the question, moved on.

  And then there were the fingerprints found on the stolen car in Prestonview that proved McGinty was still in the area. Doug was also sure Susie knew something else, something she wasn’t telling him, some thread she seemed to think tied McGinty to seeing Katherine the day she died. What was it? Another question, another angry circle. And now Lizzie Renwick was dead. Who would kill her – and why?

  He stared at the pad, eyes flitting from note to note, trying to make his random jottings coalesce into a picture that made sense. After half an hour he gave up, went back to bed, checking the door again on the way.

  Doug slept fitfully, waking suddenly with the terrifying certainty that someone was in the room with him every time he teetered on the edge of deep sleep. Finally, after starting awake for what felt like the hundredth time at 5am, he got up.

  He didn’t look as bad in the mirror as he thought he would. Dried blood was caked around his nostrils and his nose was swollen with an angry bruise that stretched under his eyes. Running a finger up the bridge of his nose hurt, but it didn’t feel broken.

  His side was worse. The bruises where he had been punched had spread overnight like malignant stains, while twisting his torso caused a gnawing pain to crawl up his side and across his back. When he went to the toilet, he was sure he was going to see blood in his urine but there was none, just a dull ache as though he had had too much to drink the night before.

  He took a long shower, had three cups of strong coffee and left, dumping a plastic bag containing his blood-soaked shirt and tie into the communal bin as he went.

  If his injuries weren’t as bad as he thought, the car’s were worse. He shuddered as he ran a finger along the gash the knife had gouged into the roof. It was only about an inch long, but it had gone clean through, leaving a ragged hole where the knife had been rocked left to right to free it again. Dimly, he wondered how he was going to explain that one to the insurance. He took a rag from the boot and plugged the hole as best he could before heading for the office.

  He got to his desk without too many curious glances, keeping his head down as much as possible so, he hoped, the bruises were merely shadows. When he logged in he checked his e-mails, unsurprised to find a release from the police press office about Lizzie Renwick’s death last night.

  The release followed the standard, first-release format; give the bare facts and follow up with comment and pertinent details later. It stated that a thirty-nine-year-old woman had been found dead at a business premises in the Old Town area of Edinburgh at approximately 9.30pm the previous evening. Her death was, at the moment, being treated as ‘suspicious’.

  Doug thought back to what Susie said about the stabbing. Damn right it was suspicious. He glanced across to the time the e-mail was sent; just after midnight. Susie, no doubt, making sure the story got out quickly and that Doug didn’t have the chance to get the drop on her again. He smiled slightly. Touché.

  He skimmed over the rest of the releases and mails he had been sent, flagging up the ones he thought might make stories for the first edition and sending lines on them over to Walter. Spotted one from the Tories, stating that Buchan was taking a leave of absence. No surprise, but he made a note to add it as a line to any future stories he did on Katherine.

  Then, noticing that more people were starting to filter in, he ambled across to the picture desk.

  ‘Mornin’, Terry.’

  ‘Good morning, Douglas,’ Terry replied, eyes fixing briefly on Doug’s bruises and then moving on. None of his business. ‘And how did I know I was going to be seeing you so early today?’

  Doug shrugged his shoulders. ‘You managed to get anything?’

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ Terry said, patting his hair down over his bald patch. ‘We’ve managed to clean up the picture a bit, make out some of the faces behind McGinty and that young woman…’

  ‘Katherine,’ Doug prompted gently.

  ‘Ah yes, Katherine. However, I can’t get that building it the background to sharpen up much. The photo must have been taken from a fixed lens, so it only focused on the forefront of the frame.’

  Doug sighed, disappointed. It had been a long shot, anyway. ‘Ah well, thanks anyway, Terry.’

  ‘Ah,’ Terry said, a smile Doug took as smug spreading across his face. ‘So you won’t want to hear the good part, then?’

  Doug straightened up, felt excitement tingle at the nape of his neck. ‘Good part? What good part?’

  ‘Well, I said we had managed to sharpen up the faces of the other people in the photograph. When we did, I recognised one of the people.’

  Doug fought back the impulse to give Terry a hug. ‘Oh,’ he said, trying to keep his voice level. ‘And who might that have been, Terry?’

  Terry punched up the scan of the photograph he had taken, then hit another button and the enhanced version filled the screen. Doug had to admit, it was good work – the back row of the picture, which Doug hadn’t paid much attention to when he’d first seen it, was now made up of clearly defined people rather than amorphous blobs of colour.

  ‘There.’ Terry pointed to a thin, pale-looking woman with long, jet-back hair and half-moon glasses similar to his own. ‘Ann Bryant.’ he said, nodding his head.

  ‘Ann Bryant,’ Doug said. The name rang a bell. ‘Where do you know her from?’

  ‘Niddrie,’ Terry replied. ‘She’s a social worker at a community project in Niddrie. I took a photograph of her place about three years ago, when they were having a funding drive. Want to see it?’

  He did.

  32

  Susie usually liked the early-morning CID meetings at Gayfield. They gave her a chance to wake up slowly, getting her first fix of caffeine for the day as she soaked in the latest developments of the case as Burns droned on at the front of the room. He had a habit of scrawling bulletpoints of the big developments across a whiteboard in a garish green pen. Some of the officers had started to call them Burn marks.

  But not this morning. She had arrived about half an hour ago, feeling brittle and drained after a night of broken sleep filled with dreams of Lizzie Renwick and blood, only to be told by Burns that she was going to have to stand up and bring everyone up to date on the latest developments in the case.

  Not normal procedure, but she got the feeling that Burns saw it as some kind of punishment for her. The Chief Superintendent may have been ready to forgive Doug and the Tribune for not letting on about the p
hotograph straightaway, but Burns wasn’t. What panicked Susie was why he was picking on her?

  She got through the briefing as best she could, filling everyone in about the photograph, the way Buchan had reacted and, of course, Lizzie Renwick’s murder. Dr Williams, despite his protests, had carried out the post-mortem examination last night. As he suspected, the cause of death was determined to be the stab wound that had punctured her subclavian artery. She had bled to death. He also found the superficial wounds hadn’t been made with the scissors; there had been a single-bladed weapon of some kind used, about six inches long, he guessed from the wounds.

  And sharp, very sharp. There were other cuts on her face and chest, and her cheekbone had been fractured. Whoever had killed Lizzie had made sure she suffered first.

  After her briefing, Burns took over, leaving Susie standing at the front of the room just long enough to make her squirm. She felt like the class idiot forced to stand up and explain why she had been talking at the same time as the teacher. He assigned workloads to the other detectives and then sent them on their way. Susie was drifting back to her desk when Burns called her into his office.

  Oh shit. He knew. He knew.

  He motioned for her to take a seat as he slurped on his coffee. Fixed her with a cool, appraising stare. Susie tried not to look away.

  ‘Good work with the briefing,’ he said finally, rocking back in his chair, folding his hands over his gut.

  Susie blinked. Not what she had been expecting. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Burns grumbled, leaning forward. ‘Look, I know you must have felt like a spare prick yesterday when Buchan got that call, but I want you to have another crack at him and his wife. This photo proves his daughter knew McGinty, I need you to find out what they knew.’

  Susie thought back to Buchan’s reaction. She didn’t think it was going to be easy.

  Burns seemed to read her thoughts. ‘Take the photograph with you,’ he said. ‘He’ll find it more difficult to ignore the facts with that in front of him.

  ‘Oh, and drop by the lock-up on the way, will you? Williams said he would have the blood work on Renwick ready for us this morning. You might as well get them on the way.’

  Susie nodded, got up and made for the door.

  ‘Oh, and one more thing, Drummond,’ Burns called as she rested her hand on the door handle.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘If you find anything interesting, I want to hear about it first, not read about it in the Tribune. Understood?’

  ‘Perfectly, sir,’ Susie said as neutrally as she could.

  Burns nodded and made a show of studying a bundle of reports in front of him. Warning delivered.

  33

  First edition dragged passed like a slow torture for Doug. He wrote the stories he was asked to, including Lizzie Renwick’s death, as quickly as he could, wanting them to be done, wanting to be able to leave his desk and get out of the office.

  Usually, Doug loved working on edition. With only an hour to fill four live pages along with any small stories for slots elsewhere in the paper and a round-up of world news, he relished the challenge. On edition, there was no ‘I’ll chase that up later.’ There wasn’t time. Sometimes, he had less than ten minutes to research and write a five-hundred-word lead, a task not made easier by the fact that 7am wasn’t always the best time of day to get people to talk to him.

  But he loved the stress, the feeling of uncontrolled chaos in the newsroom. The cries of the chief sub telling the subs to ‘get moving’ and get the stories edited and on the page, Walter breathing down his neck as he tried to fill the gaps in the paper. He loved writing with one eye on the clock, knowing he had no time to get it wrong. Not today, though.

  He sent his last story, about a mugging on Lothian Road the night before, and leaned back in his chair. Niddrie, he was thinking to himself. What the hell had Katherine Buchan been doing at a community project in Niddrie?

  He logged onto the library, punching in Ann Bryant’s name to see what they had on her, realising why the name had been familiar when he saw the list of related stories pop up on his screen. One of them was from last year, when fire crews around Edinburgh were being called out to false alarms and ambushed by groups of rock-throwing kids.

  One of the worst incidents was in Niddrie when a fireman had been hit in the eye by a rock and hospitalised. Along with the usual outraged quotes from the police and fire brigade, was a comment from the co-ordinator of the newly-formed Niddrie Community Awareness Programme, Ann Bryant. He read her quotes calling for extra funding for anti-social behaviour programmes in the area and better after-school facilities for kids, and wished he could remember more about his conversation with Bryant. He had never met her, only spoken to her on the phone. Would she remember him?

  On an impulse, he punched in Katherine’s name, cross-referencing it with Ann Bryant and Niddrie to see if there was anything in the library. Nothing. If he was going to get answers on this, he was going to have to speak to Bryant.

  He got the address for the project from Terry, who still had that insufferably smug look on his face, then filled Walter in on what he had found and headed for the door. On his way to the car, he dialled Susie’s number. After the debacle with the photograph, he wanted to let her know what was happening. Neither of them needed a repeat of yesterday.

  After a few rings, he was redirected to her answerphone. Doug left a brief message, asking her to call him as soon as she could. The danger was that she thought he was just calling to see how she got on with his research and would ignore the call, but that was a chance he would have to take. He wasn’t going to spill his guts to an answerphone.

  Niddrie, and its neighbour, Craigmillar, sat on the east of Edinburgh, buffered from the border with East Lothian and Musselburgh beyond by an outdoor shopping complex and factory outlets.

  For years, Niddrie and Craigmillar had been no-go areas for many; high crime, teenage pregnancies, poor health, underage drinking and drug abuse were all common on the streets, which wouldn’t have looked out of place in downtown Baghdad, with their rotting, shuttered tenements.

  But over the last few years, the council had started pumping cash into the area, which was, after all, only a five-minute drive from the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. The tenements were replaced by new flats, houses and office complexes. Community outreach projects like Bryant’s were being set up and funded, efforts had been made to secure residents retraining and better job prospects.

  But the inevitable scarring was still there. The houses may have changed, the streets may have widened and been tidied but many of the problems remained.

  Several years ago the body of a baby – no more than a few days old – had been found mutilated, burned and abandoned at the side of a pathway running through Craigmillar. The community had rallied together to bury the child, but the mother had never been found and the origins of the child never discovered.

  Despite the developments, the promises and attempts at a new start, Niddrie and Craigmillar still kept their secrets. And some of those secrets could kill.

  The NCAP office was housed in one of the newer buildings set off the main road that led through Niddrie. Sitting opposite, a new block of flats – which looked to Doug like a Lego set given a coat of paint and a few balconies – sat isolated in an overgrown field.

  A large red banner draped across the office building pronounced NCAP was ‘at the heart of Niddrie’ in gold lettering. Outside, a minibus with the NCAP logo sat at the kerbside. It looked like it had seen better days.

  Doug parked beside the minibus, fished his mobile out of his pocket and tried Susie’s number again. No good, still the answering machine. At least she couldn’t accuse him of not trying.

  Access to the building was via entryphone. He ran a finger down the other businesses – Niddrie and Craigmillar Rejuvenation Project, A&S Legal Services and East Edinburgh Furniture Recycling Project – and pressed the buzzer for NCAP.

  ‘Hello?’ a voice s
aid through a wave of static.

  ‘Oh, hi there. My name’s Doug McGregor. I’m with the Capital Tribune. I’m here to see Ann Bryant.’

  A pause, static hissing over the line. ‘Do you have an appointment, Mr McGregor?’

  ‘Ah, no. I was given her name by a colleague of mine, Terry Hewson. He suggested I come and speak with her.’

  Another pause. Come on, Doug thought. Open the damn door.

  Then, just as he thought he was going to be ignored, a sigh on the intercom. ‘You better come up, then,’ the voice said as the door buzzed open.

  • • •

  The NCAP office was on the top floor, at the end of a short corridor crammed with cardboard boxes and crates. Someone was moving in or out. He knocked on NCAP’s door, heard soft, shuffling steps as someone got out of a seat. Ann Bryant swung the door open and peered up at Doug. She was shorter than the photograph had suggested, only about 5ft 3ins, and her hair was now more white than black and cut almost militarily shot, but it was definitely her.

  ‘Ms Bryant?’ Doug said brightly, offering his hand.

  Bryant took Doug’s hand and shook it. Her grip was warm and weak. ‘Mr McGregor. Please, come in.’ She stood aside and ushered him into the office, also filled with crates and boxes.

  ‘Moving,’ Ann said as she moved past Doug and took a seat at a desk in front of the window. ‘We used to be on the first floor, but the previous tenants of this office moved out a couple of weeks ago. More space, so we moved.’

  Ann motioned for Doug to take a seat opposite her. ‘So, Mr McGregor,’ she said, ‘what can I do for you?’

  ‘Please, call me Doug. As I said, Terry Hewson gave me your name. He recognised you from this picture.’ Doug took out a copy of the picture and the enhanced blow-up Terry had given him, passed them across the table to Bryant. She took them, adjusted her glasses for a better look. ‘I was wondering if you could tell me anything about it?’ Doug asked.