The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  She lay in bed and listened to the trickle of running water as her husband washed. Then she listened to his footfall on the stair and the rattle of plate and pans and the clunk of the bolt on the kitchen door being drawn back so that Gustav, the St Bernard, could romp in the garden. Her husband, man of the house, was in charge, but laid down few rules. The day-to-day running of the house was left in her hands, but one rule he did lay down was that no one, family and visitor alike, shall leave the house with an empty stomach, without breaking their fast. The rattle of the pan on the plate, and the chink of mug placed on a working surface, the gushing of water into kettle, meant that Dr Reynolds observed the rule that he set. Janet Reynolds imagined him leaning against the sink sipping coffee as the bacon sizzled; a sandwich, doubtless, she often suspected, shared with the slobbering St Bernard, if in fact he didn’t have one all to himself, and then the house was once more secured with dog inside. Then she listened as his feet crunched the gravel—something else he had insisted upon as being the world’s best-known burglar deterrent—and followed by the engine starting, the whine of reverse gear as wide tyres supporting two tons of steel carried the vehicle over the gravel with further, louder, crunching to the road. The car accelerated away, climbing through the gears. Only then, when the sound of the Volvo had died completely, did she switch on the light and turn out of bed, reaching for her housecoat and slippers. She went downstairs and smiled at the remnants of a bacon sandwich both on the place by the sink and in Gustav’s bowl. She glanced at the clock on the wall above the door. Six-ten. No time to settle to anything before the children had to be up. Just a huge mug of coffee and breakfast television. Dangerous habit, she thought, breakfast telly. Very dangerous. In fact, she thought it was so dangerous she then opted for a darkened room with the curtains shutting out the world, and Radio Four for company.

  Reynolds drove away from his home in well-set Pollokshaws and pondered the dawn cracking about the villa rooftops and thought that each part of each day and each type of weather has its own particular type of beauty, should one care to look for it. Even wet grey dawns in October, in the west of Scotland. He crossed the M8 at Cardonald and drove past the Southern General Hospital, lights burning on every floor, as the wards were wakened for the day. He emerged from the Clyde tunnel into prosperous Broomhill at the time of bread and milk deliveries, of shutters being pushed up the front of shop windows, of the early starters shuffling in loosely packed queues at the bus stops. He drove down the curving descent of Clarence Drive into the prestigious tenemented development at Hyndland, left down Hyndland Road, across Great Western Road and then fourth right into Winton Drive, driving downhill to the locus, whereas earlier Sussock had approached uphill. He halted his silver Volvo Estate in front of the dark, windowless mortuary van and was irritated to see the driver and his mate sitting in the cab smoking cigarettes and leafing through that morning’s edition of the Daily Record. But, he reflected, it was a job to them, not a profession, not a vocation, but a job, and this was just one more shift.

  He walked past the van towards where PCs Hamilton and Wanless stood, both youthful, tall, conventionally handsome men who turned smartly at his approach. Hamilton’s hand went to the peak of his cap in a half doffing, half salute. Reynolds smiled in recognition of the acknowledgement. He looked at the tape, and the screen. ‘Adult male, I believe?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Hamilton’s response was snappy, alert.

  ‘And the senior CID officer?’

  ‘Just here, sir.’ Hamilton nodded to his right; Reynolds turned and saw the baggy, bustling form of Raymond Sussock striding across the pebbled surface of Winton Drive, moving as fast as he could without actually breaking into a run. ‘Sergeant Sussock.’

  ‘Sergeant?’ Reynolds smiled. ‘We meet again.’

  ‘Thank you for coming. I saw you arrive…I was doing the door-to-door…’ Sussock panted, wincing in the thin air ‘No luck so far…would you like to…I’ll show you…what…’

  ‘Just lead on, Sergeant.’ Reynolds spoke calmly. ‘I’ll pick up the gist of it as I go along.’

  Reynolds followed Sussock between the white-and-blue tapes to where the screen had been erected, noticing as he did so a line of constables forming up to sweep the area of green from top to bottom. Reynolds stopped at the screen and peered over the top. ‘Ah…’ ‘

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Well, I can see why Dr Chan was able to pronounce this gentleman as being “life extinct”. I won’t detain the removal of the body a great deal. All I’ll need to do is take air- and ground-temperature readings and a rectal temperature, that’ll tell me how long he’s been deceased. What time do you have now?’

  ‘Little after six-thirty, sir.’

  Reynolds glanced at Sussock and grimaced. Six…’ Sussock glanced at his watch. ‘Six-thirty-four, sir.’

  ‘Six-thirty-four.’ Reynolds scribbled on his pad. ‘Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll take these three temperatures now and then you can put upon the mortuary van driver and his mate to dog their fags and place our friend here in a body bag and take him to the mortuary of the GRI. I’ll conduct the PM later this morning.’

  ‘Can you give us anything to go on, sir?’

  ‘Just the obvious. Death occurred a few hours ago, so you’re in the important few hours after the event, the trail will still be hot…’ Reynolds paused as an Aer Lingus Boeing flew low overhead, flaps and wheels down on its approach to Glasgow Airport, and mused that no one would be talking on the plane at that moment, all conversation would have died a minute or two earlier as the captain announced the commencement of the final approach, and as the stewardesses scurried up the aisle ensuring all cigarettes were extinguished and all seat belts fastened and all seats in the upright position. ‘I can tell you that he wasn’t shot here…’

  ‘He wasn’t?’

  ‘No…the rest of him would be on the grass about him, sort of sprayed in an arc over a twenty-foot radius from the head. But, as you see, nothing, and also I would guess that the people hereabouts would have heard something. The sharp crack of a gunshot is not so common in Glasgow, not yet anyway, and if the gun had a silencer, the victim here is not gagged, one could expect him to shout in panic just before he was shot.’

  ‘If he knew he was going to be shot.’

  ‘Good point,’ Reynolds conceded. ‘The entry wound is at the back of the skull, he could have been kept ignorant of his fate. He’d have been easier to handle but again, if indeed that was his fate, he could very well have been life extinct before being shot. As you see, being shot in the back of the head as he has been, with a high-velocity bullet, has had the effect of exploding his face. It’s hindered your job, being the determination of his identity.’

  ‘Of course…that hadn’t occurred to me.’

  ‘Well, I’ll just take a temperature reading or two and then we can remove the body. How do you get into this thing…?’

  ‘Round the side, sir, there’s a sort of a door…a flap.’

  Sussock waited until the body had been removed, the screen dismantled and the tape taken down. He left the sweep of the greensward by the line of constables in the hands of Sergeant Piper and returned to the common stair of the newly built maisonettes. He was working down the hill, Abernethy worked up. They would meet a little more than halfway from Abernethy’s point of view, given the time Sussock had spent with Dr Reynolds. Sussock pushed open the glass-fronted street door of the common stair he had left upon Reynolds’s arrival, and his nostrils were once again assaulted by the acrid, pungent smell of a carbolic-based cleaning fluid clearly used to clean the stair. It was a smell he would have found particularly difficult to live with if he had to, but he had to concede it was better than the odour of stale urine and fresh vomit he remembered so vividly from the Gorbals of his childhood, and still met in closes and common stairs in parts of the city, such as the lift shaft of the high-rises in Royston, or the stairs in the East End schemes, once the security door had been kicked in. He went back up
to the first floor. He was working down the stairs, knocking on the doors of the top floor, then down the second floor, down to the first, and finally he called on the flats on the ground floor. The door on the first floor had the homely and inviting name of Neighbourly on a tartan background. Sussock rang the bell.

  The door was flung open. A small but stocky man stood on the threshold. He glared at Sussock and bristled with cleanliness, smelling of soap and toothpaste and aftershave. Silver-grey hair slicked to his scalp, not one that Sussock could see was out of place.

  ‘Mr Neighbourly?’ Sussock said.

  ‘Aye,’ Neighbourly snarled in an unneighbourly manner.

  ‘It’s about the incident on the green opposite, we’re making general enquiries.’

  ‘So you’ve come to arrest me?’

  ‘No,’ said Sussock, not being able to tell whether or not Mr Neighbourly was being sincere or sarcastic. ‘Should we?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Arrest you.’

  ‘You’ve done it once before, why not now?’

  ‘We have?’

  ‘You have. Ruined my life, the Glasgow police did.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Yes. So why should I help you?’

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  ‘Might have. Might not have.’

  ‘So, did you?’

  Silence.

  ‘There is such a crime as wasting police time.’ Sussock stared at the man. Small, muscular, embittered. Cold blue eyes. Behind him his flat was precise, neat, just-so, nothing out of place.

  Another silence.

  ‘I lost my British Rail apprenticeship because of you.’

  ‘Not because of me.’ It was odd, Sussock pondered, how often people can’t see the individual behind the uniform, but he had come across this attitude so often: a grudge against the police because of the actions of one officer is directed against the force as a whole. Give this man a gun and he’ll look for any uniform to shoot at. It doesn’t happen in professions where there is no uniform: a grudge against a probation officer will be held against that man or woman specifically, not against any PO because of the actions of one. Same for teachers, same for doctors. But a cop can get it in the neck because of the actions of another cop, years, even decades, earlier. ‘Sorry to hear that, anyway, but we’re investigating a murder. Do you have information or don’t you?’

  ‘Murder?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That’s serious.’

  ‘Doesn’t get much more serious. It means that any obstruction on your part is also serious.’

  ‘You’d better come in.’ The man stepped aside with an angular, clockwork movement. He was not fluid of limb.

  The inside of the man’s flat was, as Sussock had expected it to be given the nature of the hall, exact. Everything in its place, the books, annoyingly in Sussock’s view, having been arranged on the shelf so that the ones with the tallest spines were in the centre of the shelf and then fell away at either side, so that the small stubby volumes were at the end. Even more annoying were the clocks in the house. All shared the correct time: Sussock felt this man would have put them back an hour at midnight. Not waking up and sorting them in the morning after a coffee or two for this guy. If they went back at midnight, they went back at midnight. Not eight hours later. Mr Neighbourly took Sussock into his living room, which afforded a view of the green over which a line of constables were walking, eyes looking just ahead of their boot toecaps. Occasionally one would pause and stoop and pick something up and drop it in a plastic bag.

  ‘I saw it.’ Said matter-of-factly.

  ‘You saw it?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Would you like to tell me what you saw?’

  ‘Would you like to give me the apology you owe me?’

  ‘I don’t owe you an apology. I don’t owe you anything.’

  A woman glided into the room. She, like Neighbourly, was in her fifties. She was slender, dressed in a housecoat. She sat in the corner by a table, watching, but away from the action. This was man territory, she was the little woman. She didn’t seem to show respect to her husband, if indeed they were married. Fear, Sussock thought, here was fear, whispering, walking on glass on tiptoe. The man glanced at her and then turned again to Sussock. He could have done without her presence in the room: it meant that her husband had to be seen to win, and Sussock, the cop, could not be seen to lose.

  She pulled the fluffy pink collar of her housecoat around her and shrank further into the corner.

  ‘I spent my years as a bus driver.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I could have been an engineer. I lost my apprenticeship because some cop wanted a cheap and easy conviction.’

  ‘I could call back.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘I could call back,’ Sussock repeated.

  ‘No…’

  ‘You want me to stay?’

  A look of confusion flashed across Neighbourly’s eyes.

  ‘Do you want me to stay?’

  Silence.

  ‘Then I suggest you tell me what you saw.’

  ‘I was jostled by a group of louts, neds. They were being watched by the police, causing trouble up Byres Road, I was knocked into a shop doorway, the police pulled me for breach. Me!’

  ‘Last night. What did you see last night?’

  ‘The Sheriff wouldn’t listen. I was admonished, but it was a conviction. I lost my apprenticeship. I spent my days on the buses.’

  ‘You seem to have done all right.’ And having said that, Sussock instantly regretted it. It was a concession. He’d given up ground.

  ‘This. It wasn’t always like this, was it?’ Neighbourly half turned his head and the cringing woman in pink shook her head vigorously.

  ‘Mostly it was a ground floor in Queenslie. I drove out of Queenslie depot. Know Queenslie?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Aye. Glue-sniffers, smackheads, bandits, that’s where me and her lived, thirty years, because of the Glasgow polis. This, this…notice anything?’

  ‘Last night?’ Sussock spoke firmly.

  ‘All new. It’s all new. This is a lottery win. Not a big one, but enough.’

  ‘Turned out all right then, didn’t it?’ Sussock said icily. ‘You know, there are ways of appealing against a conviction, there are ways of renegotiating an apprenticeship, especially with an organization like British Rail as it was in those days. The union would have helped you. But maybe you needed the injustice, maybe you had to have something to complain about to keep you going. There are folks like that out there, find them a solution and they’ll change the problem. I come across them from time to time.’

  The woman shrank even deeper into the corner. Neighbourly’s eyes glared with anger.

  ‘May I also remind you of the offence of obstruction. That’s one conviction you won’t overturn lightly.’

  ‘You threatening me?’

  ‘No. I’m giving advice. Last night?’

  Neighbourly glared at Sussock. ‘I saw it.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘I was putting the clocks back.’

  ‘When did you put them back?’

  ‘Midnight. When else?’

  ‘About midnight.’

  ‘Exactly at midnight. I’ve got three clocks and two wristwatches in the house. It doesn’t take me any more than sixty seconds to do all three. Does it?’

  ‘No, dear.’ The woman spoke in a whisper.

  ‘Wasn’t talking to you!’

  ‘So what did you see? Exactly? At midnight?’

  Neighbourly sniffed. He was going to do this on his terms. ‘Car.’

  ‘Car?’

  ‘A car. A black car.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Pulled up opposite the house. One man. Two women. Dragged the body out, dumped it on the grass. Drove off. In no hurry.’

  ‘Descriptions?’

  ‘Guy, he was tall, rangy sort of walk. Women were…well, you know, women.
’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Women, just ordinary women…see…like her…ordinary…not young, but not old, but big, not small. I went back to fixing the clocks. Keep them right. Not a second out…’

  ‘You didn’t report it?’

  ‘Why should I. You ever help me?’

  ‘You ever needed it? Did you know that more police time is spent protecting than prosecuting? You ever needed protecting?’

  ‘Even so, Jim. If people kept their houses like I keep mine, we just wouldn’t need a police force, aye.’

  ‘One man, two women and a black car. At midnight?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  On Winton Drive, Sussock met Abernethy, who he thought looked pleased with himself. Sussock said so.

  ‘Just had a pleasant visit.’

  ‘Is that coffee on your breath?’

  ‘Yes.’ Abernethy smiled. ‘Called on a lady whose grandson has just joined the Lothian and Borders force, pictures of him everywhere, gold-framed, of course. I mean everywhere. She couldn’t be more helpful, pressed coffee and cakes on me. How could I refuse?’